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In morphology and lexicography, a lemma (pl.: lemmas or lemmata) is the canonical form, [1] dictionary form, or citation form of a set of word forms. [2] In English, for example, break, breaks, broke, broken and breaking are forms of the same lexeme, with break as the lemma by which they are indexed.
The notion of the lexeme is central to morphology, [2] the basis for defining other concepts in that field. For example, the difference between inflection and derivation can be stated in terms of lexemes: Inflectional rules relate a lexeme to its forms. Derivational rules relate a lexeme to another lexeme.
Lexicology also considers the relationships that exist between words. In linguistics, the lexicon of a language is composed of lexemes, which are abstract units of meaning that correspond to a set of related forms of a word. Lexicology looks at how words can be broken down as well as identifies common patterns they follow. [2]
In morpheme-based morphology, word forms are analyzed as arrangements of morphemes. A morpheme is defined as the minimal meaningful unit of a language. In a word such as independently, the morphemes are said to be in-, de-, pend, -ent, and -ly; pend is the (bound) root and the other morphemes are, in this case, derivational affixes.
A morpheme will sometimes be used as its own gloss. This is typically done when it is the topic of discussion, and the author wishes it to be immediately recognized in the gloss among other morphemes with similar meanings, or when it has multiple or subtle meanings that would be impractical to gloss with a single conventional abbreviation.
For example, in English, the verb 'to walk' may appear as 'walk', 'walked', 'walks' or 'walking'. The base form, 'walk', that one might look up in a dictionary, is called the lemma for the word. The association of the base form with a part of speech is often called a lexeme of the word. Lemmatization is closely related to stemming.
Part of the conjugation of the Spanish verb correr, "to run", the lexeme is "corr-". Red represents the speaker, purple the addressee (or speaker/hearer) and teal a third person. One person represents the singular number and two, the plural number. Dawn represents the past (specifically the preterite), noon the present and night the future.
In contrast, the paradigm of a lexeme is the explicit list of the inflected forms of the given lexeme (e.g. to ring, rang, rung). Said in other terms, this is the difference between a description in intension (a morphological pattern) and a description in extension (a paradigm).