Lemma (morphology)

Lexicography

In a dictionary, the lemma "go" represents the inflected 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, 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 stems are used often in corpus linguistics 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) 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. In linguistic analysis, the stem is defined more generally as a form without any of its possible inflectional morphemes (but including derivational morphemes and may contain multiple roots). 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: the past tense was co-opted from a different verb, "to wend".

Headword

A headword or catchword is the lemma 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, related lemmas such as compound words or phrases that contain the headword, and encyclopedic information about the concepts represented by the word.

For example, the headword bread 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 contains around 500,000 headwords. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has around 273,000 headwords along with 220,000 other 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. 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).

Conventions

Many dictionaries list all forms of a term combined as one entry under a single headword. The form chosen for the headword is then governed by some common conventions.

Nouns

For languages with grammatical case, the headword takes the form of the nominative case, used when the noun serves as the subject (grammar) of a sentence. Unless it concerns a plurale tantum, the singular is used. For example, the Latin word for "rose" will traditionally be listed under the entry rosa, together with its inflected forms (rosae, rosam, rosarum, rosis) – if these are given at all. Some languages have separate forms for a male and female sense of a noun, as in French chanteur (for a male singer) and chanteuse (for a female singer). The female form may then be listed under the male form, which is used as the headword.

Adjectives

As for nouns, adjectives are listed in the nominative singular (for languages that inflect for grammatical case or number). If adjectives are inflected for gender, the masculine form is traditionally used for the headword. This headword may also serve as the headword for the comparative and superlative, even when these are irregular, as in good – better – best.

Verbs

For most languages, the traditional headword of a verb is its infinitive form. Notable exceptions are Latin and Ancient Greek; for these, the traditional choice is the first-person singular. So a traditional Latin dictionary has an entry dico (meaning "I say"), and not dicere ("to say"). Likewise, for Ancient Greek the traditional headword is the first-person singular λέγω (legō), and not the infinitive λέγειν (legein). Modern Greek has no infinitives; again, the first-person singular is used. The same holds for Bulgarian, while for Macedonian the third-person singular is used.

Infinitives and other verb forms may be marked for tense, aspect and voice; the headword of choice is usually as unmarked as possible, which for many languages may correspond to present tense, imperfective aspect and active voice. In languages with deponent verbs, which have no active forms, the middle or passive voice is used for such verbs. For example, the Latin verb for "follow" will be found under sequor ("I follow").