leksyki

Leksyki, also referred to as lexica or lexicons, are the inventories of words and fixed expressions that constitute a language’s vocabulary. In linguistic theory, the lexicon stores information about the form, meaning, and grammatical behavior of lexical items. A typical entry, or lemma, represents the base form of a word and links to its senses, morphological variants, and usage notes.

Lexica contain various kinds of information: orthography and pronunciation; part of speech; sense distinctions; inflectional patterns; semantic relations such as synonyms, antonyms, and hypernyms; collocations and subcategorization frames; frequency data; etymology; and sometimes dialectal or regional notes. They distinguish between lemmas and their inflected forms, noting that different word forms may share a single lemma.

There are two broad senses of lexica: the mental lexicon, i.e., the vocabulary stored in the mind of a speaker, and external lexica, such as dictionaries, word lists, and lexical databases used in education, lexicography, and computational linguistics. In natural language processing, lexica provide essential resources for tokenization, part-of-speech tagging, morphological analysis, semantic interpretation, and language generation.

Lexica evolve as languages change, with new terms entering use, senses shifting, and obsolete forms fading. Lexicography, the practical craft of compiling dictionaries and lexical databases, curates lexica for general and specialized audiences. They play a central role in language learning, linguistic research, and computational applications.

See also: lexicon, lexicography, vocabulary, morphology, natural language processing, WordNet.