lexikologia

Lexicology is a branch of linguistics that studies the lexicon of a language—the words and fixed expressions it uses, their forms, meanings, and the relations among them. It treats the vocabulary as a system rather than a collection of isolated items, focusing on how words are formed, stored, and used.

The field covers a range of topics, including word formation (derivation, compounding, inflectional paradigms), the internal structure of lexical entries (lemmas, inflected forms, and grammatical information), and semantic relationships such as synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy, polysemy, and meronymy. It also investigates lexical fields, collocations, and semantic change over time, as well as etymology and word borrowings, reflecting how social and cultural factors shape vocabulary.

Data sources and methods in lexicology include corpora, dictionaries, etymological references, and historical texts. Researchers apply morphological analysis, semantic analysis, and frequency studies to describe how words are formed, how meanings shift, and how words relate within the lexicon. Corpus-based approaches help map usage patterns and lexical connections in actual language use.

Lexicology intersects with related disciplines such as lexicography, morphology, semantics, sociolinguistics, and computational linguistics. While lexicography focuses on describing and organizing lexical knowledge for dictionaries, lexicology seeks to understand the vocabulary system as a whole and its evolution. Applications include language teaching, lexicographic standardization, and natural language processing, where a solid understanding of vocabulary structure is essential.