O (NIE)MOŻLIWOŚCI UPRAWIANIA LEKSYKOLOGII PORÓWNAWCZEJ
On the (Im)Possibility of Dealing with Comparative Lexicology

Summary/Abstract: The most difficult task in comparative lexicology, which is usually reduced to contrastive semantics, is finding tertium comparationis. It cannot be the socalled objective nonlinguistic reality, since it is accessible just through language. What is linguistic categorization is indicated in the article based on the analysis of the Polish word klawiatura (keyboard), referring to the linguistic notion klawisz (key). In the nonlinguistic world this category refers to a variety of objects. Language users tend to consider their own categories discovered in their mother tongue as natural. Only their contact with another onomastic system evokes reflection on the linguistic form. Cognitive semantics stresses the cognitive effort absorbed within language. Not enough attention is drawn so far to contact linguistics, impulses coming from outside, which reveal in copying foreign structures, which in turn is negatively viewed as far as language culture is concerned, and thus ignored. However, the range of the phenomenon is wide, which leads to desirable convergence of notion-lexical systems. Their comparison can be based on neither taken from the outside ontological nor logical criteria, but acquired from system reconstruction semantic fields and the way they are lexically applied.

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