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In
morphology Morphology, from the Greek and meaning "study of shape", may refer to: Disciplines *Morphology (archaeology), study of the shapes or forms of artifacts *Morphology (astronomy), study of the shape of astronomical objects such as nebulae, galaxies, ...
and
lexicography Lexicography is the study of lexicons, and is divided into two separate academic disciplines. It is the art of compiling dictionaries. * Practical lexicography is the art or craft of compiling, writing and editing dictionaries. * Theoretica ...
, a lemma (plural ''lemmas'' or ''lemmata'') is the canonical form, dictionary form, or citation form of a set of word forms. In
English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ...
, for example, ''break'', ''breaks'', ''broke'', ''broken'' and ''breaking'' are forms of the same lexeme, with ''break'' as the lemma by which they are indexed. ''Lexeme'', in this context, refers to the set of all the inflected or alternating forms in the paradigm of a single word, and ''lemma'' refers to the particular form that is chosen by convention to represent the lexeme. Lemmas have special significance in highly
inflected languages Fusional languages or inflected languages are a type of synthetic language, distinguished from agglutinative languages by their tendency to use a single inflectional morpheme to denote multiple grammatical, syntactic, or semantic features. For e ...
such as
Arabic Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C. E.Watson; Walte ...
, Turkish and
Russian Russian(s) refers to anything related to Russia, including: *Russians (, ''russkiye''), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries * Rossiyane (), Russian language term for all citizens and p ...
. The process of determining the ''lemma'' for a given lexeme is called
lemmatisation Lemmatisation ( or lemmatization) in linguistics is the process of grouping together the inflected forms of a word so they can be analysed as a single item, identified by the word's lemma, or dictionary form. In computational linguistics, lemmati ...
. The lemma can be viewed as the chief of the
principal parts In language learning, the principal parts of a verb are those forms that a student must memorize in order to be able to conjugate the verb through all its forms. The concept originates in the humanist Latin schools, where students learned verbs ...
, although lemmatisation is at least partly arbitrary.


Morphology

The form of a word that is chosen to serve as the lemma is usually the least
marked In linguistics and social sciences, markedness is the state of standing out as nontypical or divergent as opposed to regular or common. In a marked–unmarked relation, one term of an opposition is the broader, dominant one. The dominant defau ...
form, but there are several exceptions such as the use of the infinitive for verbs in some languages. For English, the citation form of a noun is the singular (and non-possessive) form: ''mouse'' rather than ''mice''. For multiword lexemes that contain
possessive adjective Possessive determiners (from la, possessivus, translit=; grc, κτητικός / ktētikós - en. ktetic Lallu) are determiners which express possession. Some traditional grammars of English refer to them as possessive adjectives, though they do ...
s or reflexive pronouns, the citation form uses a form of the indefinite pronoun ''one'': ''do one's best'', ''perjure oneself''. In European languages with grammatical gender, the citation form of regular adjectives and nouns is usually the masculine singular. If the language also has cases, the citation form is often the masculine singular nominative. For many languages, the citation form of a verb is the infinitive:
French French (french: français(e), link=no) may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to France ** French language, which originated in France, and its various dialects and accents ** French people, a nation and ethnic group identified with Franc ...
',
German German(s) may refer to: * Germany (of or related to) **Germania (historical use) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law **Ge ...
', Hindustani /,
Spanish Spanish might refer to: * Items from or related to Spain: **Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain **Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many Latin American countries **Spanish cuisine Other places * Spanish, Ontario, Can ...
'. English verbs usually have an infinitive, which in its bare form (without the particle ''to'') is its least marked (for example, ''break'' is chosen over ''to break'', ''breaks'', ''broke'', ''breaking'', and ''broken''); for defective verbs with no infinitive the present tense is used (for example, ''must'' has only one form while ''shall'' has no infinitive, and both lemmas are their lexemes' present tense forms). For Latin, Ancient Greek, Modern Greek, and Bulgarian, the first person singular
present tense The present tense (abbreviated or ) is a grammatical tense whose principal function is to locate a situation or event in the present time. The present tense is used for actions which are happening now. In order to explain and understand present t ...
is traditionally used, but some modern dictionaries use the infinitive instead (except for Bulgarian, which lacks infinitives; for contracted verbs in Ancient Greek, an uncontracted first person singular present tense is used to reveal the contract vowel: ''philéō'' for ''philō'' "I love" mplying affection ''agapáō'' for ''agapō'' "I love" mplying regard. Finnish dictionaries list verbs not under their root, but under the first infinitive, marked with ''-(t)a'', ''-(t)ä''. For
Japanese Japanese may refer to: * Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia * Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan * Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture ** Japanese diaspor ...
, the non-past (present and future) tense is used. For
Arabic Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C. E.Watson; Walte ...
the third-person singular masculine of the past/perfect tense is the least-marked form and is used for entries in modern dictionaries. In older dictionaries, which are still commonly used, the triliteral of the word, either a verb or a noun, is used. This is similar to
Hebrew Hebrew (; ; ) is a Northwest Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Historically, it is one of the spoken languages of the Israelites and their longest-surviving descendants, the Jews and Samaritans. It was largely preserved ...
, which also uses the third-person singular masculine perfect form, e.g. ברא ''bara' '' create, כפר ''kaphar'' deny. Georgian uses the
verbal noun A verbal noun or gerundial noun is a verb form that functions as a noun. An example of a verbal noun in English is 'sacking' as in the sentence "The sacking of the city was an epochal event" (''sacking'' is a noun formed from the verb ''sack''). ...
. For Korean, ''-da'' is attached to the stem. In Tamil, an
agglutinative language An agglutinative language is a type of synthetic language with morphology that primarily uses agglutination. Words may contain different morphemes to determine their meanings, but all of these morphemes (including stems and affixes) tend to rem ...
, the verb stem (which is also the imperative form - the least marked one) is often cited, e.g., '' இரு'' In
Irish Irish may refer to: Common meanings * Someone or something of, from, or related to: ** Ireland, an island situated off the north-western coast of continental Europe ***Éire, Irish language name for the isle ** Northern Ireland, a constituent unit ...
, words are highly inflected by case (genitive, nominative, dative and vocative) and by their place within a sentence because of initial mutations. The noun ''cainteoir'', the lemma for the noun meaning "speaker", has a variety of forms: ''chainteoir'', ''gcainteoir'', ''cainteora'', ''chainteora'', ''cainteoirí'', ''chainteoirí'' and ''gcainteoirí''. Some phrases are cited in a sort of lemma: '' Carthago delenda est'' (literally, "Carthage must be destroyed") is a common way of citing Cato, but what he said was nearer to ''censeo Carthaginem esse delendam'' ("I hold Carthage to be in need of destruction").


Lexicography

In a dictionary, the lemma "go" represents the
inflected In linguistic morphology, inflection (or inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and de ...
forms "go", "goes", "going", "went", and "gone". The relationship between an inflected form and its lemma is usually denoted by an angle bracket, e.g., "went" < "go". Of course, the disadvantage of such simplifications is the inability to look up a declined or conjugated form of the word, but some dictionaries, like
Webster's Dictionary ''Webster's Dictionary'' is any of the English language dictionaries edited in the early 19th century by American lexicographer Noah Webster (1758–1843), as well as numerous related or unrelated dictionaries that have adopted the Webster's n ...
, list "went". Multilingual dictionaries vary in how they deal with this issue: the Langenscheidt dictionary of German does not list ''ging'' (< ''gehen''), but the Cassell does. Lemmas or
word stem In linguistics, a word stem is a part of a word responsible for its lexical meaning. The term is used with slightly different meanings depending on the morphology of the language in question. In Athabaskan linguistics, for example, a verb stem i ...
s are used often in
corpus linguistics Corpus linguistics is the study of a language as that language is expressed in its text corpus (plural ''corpora''), its body of "real world" text. Corpus linguistics proposes that a reliable analysis of a language is more feasible with corpora ...
for determining word frequency. In that usage, the specific definition of "lemma" is flexible depending on the task it is being used for.


Pronunciation

A word may have different pronunciations, depending on its phonetic environment (the neighbouring sounds) or on the degree of stress in a sentence. An example of the latter is the weak and strong forms of certain English function words like ''some'' and ''but'' (pronounced , when stressed but , when unstressed). Dictionaries usually give the pronunciation used when the word is pronounced alone (its
isolation form Morphophonology (also morphophonemics or morphonology) is the branch of linguistics that studies the interaction between morphological and phonological or phonetic processes. Its chief focus is the sound changes that take place in morphemes (mi ...
) and with stress, but they may also note common weak forms of pronunciation.


Difference between stem and lemma

The stem is the part of the word that never changes even when morphologically inflected; a lemma is the least marked form of the word. For example, from "produced", the lemma is "produce", but the stem is "produc-". This is because there are words such as production. and producing In linguistic analysis, the stem is defined more generally as the analyzed base form from which all inflected forms can be formed. When phonology is taken into account, the definition of the unchangeable part of the word is not useful, as can be seen in the phonological forms of the words in the preceding example: "produced" vs. "production" . Some lexemes have several stems but one lemma. For instance the verb " to go" has the stems "go" and "went" due to
suppletion In linguistics and etymology, suppletion is traditionally understood as the use of one word as the inflected form of another word when the two words are not cognate. For those learning a language, suppletive forms will be seen as "irregular" or eve ...
: the past tense was co-opted from a different verb, " to wend".


Headword

A headword, lemma, or catchword is the word under which a set of related dictionary or encyclopaedia entries appears. The headword is used to locate the entry, and dictates its alphabetical position. Depending on the size and nature of the dictionary or encyclopedia, the entry may include alternative meanings of the word, its etymology, pronunciation and inflections,
compound word In linguistics, a compound is a lexeme (less precisely, a word or sign) that consists of more than one stem. Compounding, composition or nominal composition is the process of word formation that creates compound lexemes. Compounding occurs when ...
s or phrases that contain the headword, and encyclopedic information about the concepts represented by the word. For example, the headword ''
bread Bread is a staple food prepared from a dough of flour (usually wheat) and water, usually by baking. Throughout recorded history and around the world, it has been an important part of many cultures' diet. It is one of the oldest human-made food ...
'' may contain the following (simplified) definitions: :Bread :''(noun)'' :* A common food made from the combination of flour, water and yeast :* Money ''(slang)'' :''(verb)'' :* To coat in breadcrumbs :— to know which side your bread is buttered to know how to act in your own best interests. The ''
Academic Dictionary of Lithuanian The Academic Dictionary of Lithuanian ( lt, Didysis lietuvių kalbos žodynas or lt, Akademinis lietuvių kalbos žodynas, label=none) is a comprehensive thesaurus of the Lithuanian language and one of the most extensive lexicographical works in ...
'' contains around 500,000 headwords. The '' Oxford English Dictionary'' (OED) has around 273,000 headwords along with 220,000 lemmas, while '' Webster's Third New International Dictionary'' has about 470,000. The '' Deutsches Wörterbuch'' (DWB), the largest lexicon of the German language, has around 330,000 headwords.The Deutsches Wörterbuch
at the BBAW, retrieved 22-June-2012.
These values are cited by the dictionary makers and may not use exactly the same definition of a headword. In addition, headwords may not accurately reflect a dictionary's physical size. The ''OED'' and the ''DWB'', for instance, include exhaustive historical reviews and exact citations from source documents not usually found in standard dictionaries. The term 'lemma' comes from the practice in Greco-Roman antiquity of using the word to refer to the headwords of marginal glosses in scholia; for this reason, the Ancient Greek plural form is sometimes used, namely ''lemmata'' (Greek λῆμμα, pl. λήμματα).


See also

* Lexeme * Lexical Markup Framework *
Null morpheme In morphology, a null morpheme or zero morpheme is a morpheme that has no phonetic form. In simpler terms, a null morpheme is an "invisible" affix. It is a concept useful for analysis, by contrasting null morphemes with alternatives that do have ...
*
Principal parts In language learning, the principal parts of a verb are those forms that a student must memorize in order to be able to conjugate the verb through all its forms. The concept originates in the humanist Latin schools, where students learned verbs ...
* Root (linguistics) *
Uninflected word In linguistic morphology, an uninflected word is a word that has no morphological markers (inflection) such as affixes, ablaut, consonant gradation, etc., indicating declension or conjugation. If a word has an uninflected form, this is usually ...


References


External links

{{Authority control Lexical units Units of linguistic morphology Linguistics terminology