Lemma (linguistics)
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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.
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[edit] Usage
"Lemma" in a more general usage refers to a headword or heading in any kind of dictionary, encyclopaedia, or commentary. So, for example, the lemma of this article is "Lemma (linguistics)". The term is derived 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 λήμμα, pl. λήμματα).
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". The disadvantage of such simplifications is, of course, the inability to look up a declined or conjugated form of the word. The American Webster, for example, lists "went". Multi-lingual 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. 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.
[edit] Lemmas in different languages
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, an uncontracted first person singular present tense is used to reveal the contract vowel, e.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, however in older dictionaries which are still commonly used today the triliteral of the word, whether it is a verb or a noun, is used. 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.
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 of the indefinite pronoun one: e.g. do one's best, perjure oneself.
Some phrases are cited in a sort of lemma, e.g. "Carthago delenda est" (Carthage must be destroyed) is a common way of citing Cato, although he more often said, "ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam".
