Lemma (linguistics)

In linguistics, and particularly in morphology, a lemma is the canonical form of a lexeme. Lexeme refers to the set of all the forms that have the same meaning, and lemma refers to the particular form that is chosen by convention to represent the lexeme. Lemmas have special significance in highly inflected languages such as Czech.

Related Topics:
Linguistics - Morphology - Lexeme - Inflected languages - Czech

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In most languages, dictionary headwords are an example of lemmas (or lemmata). For example, the word "go" in a dictionary represents the forms "go", "goes", "going", "went", and "gone". The form that is chosen to be the lemma is usually the least marked form. There are significant exceptions; e.g. in {{ll|Finnish}}, the dictionaries use not the verb root, but the first infinitive marked with -ta as the key with verbs, because it contains the unchanged form of the root, while the "unmarked" form or root has undergone consonant gradation. Likewise, with nouns, the nominative, but not the other forms, may undergo sound changes, e.g. vete- ? vesi, or lampaa- ? lammas.

Related Topics:
Marked - Consonant gradation

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In Arabic, which has no infinitives, the third person singular of the past tense is the least marked form, and is used for dictionary entries.

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Lemmas are used often in corpus linguistics for determining word frequency. In such usage the specific definition of "lemma" is flexible depending on the task it is being used for.

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