leksikal

Leksikal is a term used in linguistics and language studies to describe aspects related to the lexicon, the collection of words and fixed expressions in a language. It denotes the vocabulary side of a language rather than its syntax, phonology, or morphology. The leksikal domain covers lexical items such as content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs), as well as multiword expressions, idioms, and collocations, along with the semantic relationships among them.

The word leksikal derives from lexis, the Greek root for “word,” and is cognate with the English word lexical. In linguistic analysis, leksikal phenomena include word formation, sense distinctions like polysemy, synonymy and antonymy, semantic fields, and the networks of collocations that give a language its characteristic usage patterns. Leksikal studies often address how new words enter a language (lexicalization), how vocabulary varies across dialects, and how lexical meaning shifts over time.

Applications of leksikal analysis appear across several fields. In descriptive linguistics and language teaching, leksikal knowledge refers to vocabulary knowledge—the range of words a speaker can recognize and use, including collocations and idioms. In computational linguistics, leksikal resources such as dictionaries, thesauri, and lexical databases underpin tasks like tokenization, lemmatization, part-of-speech tagging, and semantic similarity.

See also: lexicon, lexis, lexical semantics, lexicography, vocabulary, lexicalization.