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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.
In many languages, words appear in several inflected forms. 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.
For example, in the English language, run, runs, ran and running are forms of the same lexeme, which can be represented as RUN. [ note 1 ] One form, the lemma (or citation form), is chosen by convention as the canonical form of a lexeme.
In mathematics and other fields, [a] a lemma (pl.: lemmas or lemmata) is a generally minor, proven proposition which is used to prove a larger statement. For that reason, it is also known as a "helping theorem " or an "auxiliary theorem".
Burnside's lemma also known as the Cauchy–Frobenius lemma; Frattini's lemma (finite groups) Goursat's lemma; Mautner's lemma (representation theory) Ping-pong lemma (geometric group theory) Schreier's subgroup lemma; Schur's lemma (representation theory) Zassenhaus lemma
Lemma (morphology), the canonical, dictionary or citation form of a word; Lemma (psycholinguistics), a mental abstraction of a word about to be uttered;
A lemma is a group of lexemes generated by inflectional morphology. Lemmas are represented in dictionaries by headwords that list the citation forms and any irregular forms, since these must be learned to use the words correctly. Lexemes derived from a word by derivational morphology are considered new lemmas.
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. [4] This can be explained by models that do not assume a distinct level between the semantic and the phonological stages (and so lack a lemma representation). [3]