Lemma (linguistics)
Encyclopedia : L : LE : LEM : Lemma (linguistics)
In linguistics, and particularly in morphology, a lemma or citation form 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.
In many languages, the citation form of a verb is the infinitive: French aller, German gehen. In English we can use either the bare infinitive go or the full infinitive to go. In Latin and Greek, however, the first person singular present tense is normally used, though occasionally the infinitive may also be seen. (For contracted verbs in Greek, a hypothetical uncontracted first person singular present tense is used to reveal the contract vowel, e.g. φιλέω* philéo for φιλῶ philô.) 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. Hebrew often uses the 3rd person masculine qal perfect. For Korean, -da is attached to the stem.
In English, the citation form of a noun is the singular: e.g. mouse rather than mice. For multi-word lexemes which contain possessive adjectives or reflexive pronouns, the citation form uses a form the indefinite pronoun one: e.g. do one's best, perjure oneself.
Dictionary headwords are 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 Finnish, the dictionaries use not the verb root, but the first infinitive marked with -(t)a, -(t)ä as the key with verbs.
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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