leksikologia

Leksikologia, or lexicology, is a branch of linguistics that studies the vocabulary of a language—the lexicon. It analyzes the inventory of words, their forms, meanings, and the relationships among them, as well as how words are organized within a language’s mental and written lexicon.

Its scope includes the internal structure of the lexicon (morphology, derivation, and compounding), semantic organization (sense, polysemy, synonyms, antonyms, hyponymy), etymology and diachronic change, and patterns of collocation and phraseology. It also investigates how words are used in context, including variations across registers and domain-specific terminology.

Lexicology is closely related to, but distinct from, lexicography—the practical activity of compiling dictionaries and other lexical resources. Lexicology provides theoretical frameworks and descriptive data that inform dictionary-making and lexical databases.

Methodologically, lexicology relies on corpus data, etymological sources, historical texts, and cross-linguistic comparisons, and it intersects with cognitive and sociolinguistic approaches to how lexemes are stored and accessed in the mind.

Subfields include historical or etymological lexicology, synchronic lexicology, cognitive lexicology, and the lexicology of specialized domains. Applications span language teaching, natural language processing, the design of lexical resources for NLP systems, and lexicographic work. In Polish linguistic studies, leksykologia is commonly treated as a core area of theoretical linguistics that informs understanding of word meaning, formation, and usage.