See also: Headword

In linguistics a lemma (plural lemmas or lemmata) is the canonical form of a lexeme. See also Lemma (linguistics A headword, head word, lemma, or sometimes catchword is the word under which a set of related Dictionary Linguistics is the scientific study of Language, encompassing a number of sub-fields Generally in Mathematics, a canonical form (often called normal form or standard form) of an object is a standard way of presenting that object For its use in the context of Computer Science see Lexical analysis.

Specifically, in lexicography, "lemma" is a synonym for headword, q. The pursuit of lexicography is divided into two related disciplines Practical lexicography is the art or Craft of compiling writing and editing dictionaries See also Lemma (linguistics A headword, head word, lemma, or sometimes catchword is the word under which a set of related Dictionary v. For example, in the English language, run, runs, ran and running are forms of the same lexeme, with run as the lemma. English is a West Germanic language originating in England and is the First language for most people in the United Kingdom, the United States

In morphology, a lemma is the canonical form of a lexeme. Morphology is the field of Linguistics that studies the internal structure of words For its use in the context of Computer Science see Lexical analysis. Lexeme, in this context, 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 Grammar, inflection or inflexion is the way language handles grammatical relations and relational categories such as tense, mood, voice Czech (ˈʧɛk čeština ˈʧɛʃcɪna in Czech is a West Slavic language with about 12 million native speakers it is the majority language in the In this sense, a lemma can also be called a citation form. The process of determining the lemma for a given word is called lemmatisation. Lemmatisation is the process of grouping together the different inflected forms of a word so they can be analysed as a single item (cf

In psycholinguistics, the term lemma has a more restricted use: it is an abstract form of a word that is used in speech production. Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable Humans to acquire use In the best accepted psycholinguistic models, speech production has several stages, and the lemma occurs after the word has been selected mentally, but before any information has been accessed about the sounds in it (and thus before the word can be pronounced). It therefore contains information concerning only meaning and the relation of this word to others in the sentence. This article is about meaning as it is studied in the discipline of linguistics

Morphology

In a dictionary, the lemma "go" represents the inflected forms "go", "goes", "going", "went", and "gone". In Grammar, inflection or inflexion is the way language handles grammatical relations and relational categories such as tense, mood, voice The relationship between an inflected form and its lemma is usually denoted by an angle bracket, e. g. "went" < "go". The disadvantage of such simplifications is, of course, the inability to look up a declined or conjugated form of the word, although some dictionaries, like Webster's, will list "went". Webster's Dictionary is the name given to a common type of English language dictionary in the United States. Multilingual dictionaries vary in how they deal with this issue: the Langenscheidt dictionary of German does not list ging (< gehen); the Cassell does.

The form that is chosen to be the lemma is usually the least marked form, though there are occasional exceptions; e. Markedness is a linguistic concept that developed out of the Prague School (also known as the Prague linguistic circle) g. in Finnish, the dictionaries lists verbs not under the verb root, but under the first infinitive marked with -(t)a, -(t)ä. Finnish ( or suomen kieli) is the language spoken by the majority of the population in Finland (92% As of 2006) and by ethnic Finns outside

Lemmas are used often in corpus linguistics for determining word frequency. Corpus linguistics is the Study of language as expressed in Samples ( corpora) or "real world" text In such usage the specific definition of "lemma" is flexible depending on the task it is being used for.

Lemmas in different languages

In English, the citation form of a noun is the singular: e. In linguistics grammatical number is a Grammatical category of nouns pronouns and adjective and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions (such as "one" g. mouse rather than mice. For multi-word lexemes which contain possessive adjectives or reflexive pronouns, the citation form uses a form of the indefinite pronoun one: e. What are traditionally and popularly called possessive adjectives &mdash in linguistic analyses possessive pronouns, possessive determiners or genitive pronouns An indefinite pronoun is a Pronoun that refers to one or more unspecified beings objects or places g. do one's best, perjure oneself. In languages with grammatical gender, the citation form of regular adjectives and nouns is usually the masculine singular. In Linguistics, grammatical genders, sometimes also called Noun classes are classes of nouns reflected in the behavior of associated words every noun must belong If the language additionally has cases, the citation form is often the masculine singular nominative. In Grammar, the case of a Noun or Pronoun indicates its Grammatical function in a greater Phrase or Clause; such as the

In many languages, the citation form of a verb is the infinitive: French aller, German gehen. For English usage of verbs see the wiki article English verbs. In Grammar, infinitive is the name for certain verb forms that exist in many languages French ( français,) is a Romance language spoken around the world by 118 million people as a native language and by about 180 to 260 million people The German language (de ''Deutsch'') is a West Germanic language and one of the world's major languages. In English it usually the full infinitive (to go), but the bare infinitive for some defective verbs (must). In Linguistics, a defective verb is a Verb with an incomplete conjugation. In Latin and Greek, however, the first person singular present tense is normally used, though occasionally the infinitive may also be seen, and in Japanese the non-past (present and future) tense is used. Latin ( lingua Latīna, laˈtiːna is an Italic language, historically spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. Greek (el ελληνική γλώσσα or simply el ελληνικά — "Hellenic" is an Indo-European language, spoken today by 15-22 million people mainly Present Tense is the first Sagittarius album released in 1968 by Columbia Records. is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities (For contracted verbs in Greek, an uncontracted first person singular present tense is used to reveal the contract vowel, e. Ancient Greek grammar is morphologically complex and preserves several features of Proto-Indo-European morphology g. φιλέω philéō for φιλῶ philō "I love" [implying affection]; αγαπάω agapáō for αγαπῶ agapō "I love" [implying regard]).

In Arabic, which has no infinitives, the third person singular of the past tense is the least-marked form, and is used for entries in modern dictionaries. Arabic (ar الْعَرَبيّة (informally ar عَرَبيْ) in terms of the number of speakers is the largest living member of the Semitic language In older dictionaries, which are still commonly used today, the triliteral of the word, either a verb or a noun, is used. In the terminology used to discuss the grammar of the Semitic languages and some other Afro-Asiatic languages, a triliteral ( Arabic: جذر ثلاثي Hebrew often uses the 3rd person masculine qal perfect, e. g. ברא bara' create, כפר kaphar cover. For Korean, -da is attached to the stem. This article is mainly about the spoken Korean language See Hangul for details on the native Korean writing system

Some phrases are cited in a sort of lemma, e. g. Carthago delenda est (literally, "Carthage must be destroyed") is a common way of citing Cato, although what he said was more like, Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam ("As to the rest, I hold that Carthage must be destroyed").

Psycholinguistics

When we produce a word, we are essentially turning our thoughts into sounds (a process known as lexicalisation). In Psycholinguistics lexicalisation is the process of going from meaning to sound in speech production In many psycholinguistic models this is considered to be at least a two-stage process. The lemma is thus intermediate between the semantic level (where meaning is specified) and the phonological level (where the sounds of the word are specified). Semantics is the study of meaning in communication The word derives from Greek σημαντικός ( semantikos) "significant" from This article is about meaning as it is studied in the discipline of linguistics Phonology ( Greek φωνή (phōnē voice sound + λόγος (lógos word speech subject of discussion is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning It is an abstract form containing syntactic information (about how the word can be used in a sentence), but no information about the pronunciation of the word. In Linguistics, syntax (from Ancient Greek grc συν- syn-, "together" and grc τάξις táxis, "arrangement" is the In this context, the lexeme is the phonologically specified form that is selected after the lemma.

This two-staged model is the most widely supported theory of speech production in psycholinguistics^[1], although it has been recently challenged. ^[2] For example, there is some evidence to indicate that the grammatical gender of a noun is retrieved from the word's phonological form (the lexeme) rather than from the lemma. In Linguistics, grammatical genders, sometimes also called Noun classes are classes of nouns reflected in the behavior of associated words every noun must belong ^[3] This is easily explained by Caramazza's Independent Network model, which does not assume a distinct level between the semantic and the phonological stages (so there is no lemma representation); in this model, syntactic information about the word in this model is activated in the semantic or phonological level (so gender would be activated in the latter). ^[4]

See also

• Linguistics
• Corpus linguistics
• Morphology
• Psycholinguistics
• Markedness
• Principal parts
• Root (linguistics)
• Null morpheme
• Lemmatisation
• Lexeme
• Uninflected word
• lexical markup framework

References

External links

• Lemma vs lexeme