A lemma is a word as presented in a dictionary or the conceptualization of a word before it has a sound. It consists of morphemes and should not be confused with the root word. The process of creating a lemma is called lexicalization.
A lemma is one of two things about languages. In linguistics, it is a word as it is presented in a dictionary or in a quotation. In psycholinguistics, it is the conceptualization of a word before it has been given a sound.
The linguistic lemma is a word without any morphological modification made to it. An example is the word “go”. The dictionary form of “gone” is still “go”, as it is for “go”, “go” and “gone”. Some words are regular, such as the verb ‘fish’ or the noun ‘cat’, but others are irregular and this sometimes creates confusion as to the lemma of that word. The lemma of “we”, “mine”, “mine” and “our” is “I”.
Each lemma consists of morphemes consisting of at least one phoneme. Each morpheme is a meaningful fragment of a word. Some of these can act as single words, while others only work when combined with another morpheme. It is therefore possible that certain lemmas are created from more than one independent morpheme; for example, “bathroom”.
The lemma should not be confused with the root word. A word stem is the part of a word that does not change as the word goes through its various forms when inflected, cased, numbered, or in gender. Often the stem and the lemma can be the same. In English, words like ‘wait’ and ‘run’ are both headwords and roots, but other words like ‘I’ and ‘eat’ are not, because the basic structure of the word changes completely during morphology.
Depending on the language spoken by a person, a headword can take different forms. Latin and Greek place the main voice in the first person singular; Arabic, on the other hand, quotes words in the third person masculine form. In English, French and German, the verb is put in the infinitive.
In psycholinguistics, the lemma is defined as the concept of a word. For example, in the 1780s, British jurist Jeremy Bentham wanted to coin a word that could be used to describe things or organizations that existed between different nations. Thinking about this concept, he was creating a lemma. Later, he decided to combine “inter” with “national” to create “international”, although he later apologized for his inelegance.
The process of turning a thought into a new word is called lexicalization. This process has a number of stages including conceptualization, formulation and execution. The creation of the lemma falls within the conceptualization phase in which the idea of the word is defined, but the letters and sounds attributed to its voice are still unknown.
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