= Lemma
{disambiguate=linguistics}
A <lemma (linguistics)> is a conventional citation form used to represent a lexical entry or a set of related grammatical forms. It differs from a <lexeme>, the abstract vocabulary item being represented, and from an arbitrary truncation of a word's spelling. The convention is language-specific.<Morphology: General Principles in Universal Dependencies>[Lemmas, canonical dictionary form and language-particular conventions]{ref}
In a simple English analysis, `walks`, `walked` and `walking` can be assigned the <lemma (linguistics)> `walk`. The <Universal Dependencies> guidelines also distinguish <inflection> from <derivational morphology>: `organizations` has citation form `organization`, not `organize` or `organ`.
Context can be needed before the citation form is chosen. The spelling `saw` can name a tool or occur as a past form of `see`; a process that uses spelling alone cannot settle every such ambiguity. Recording the <part of speech>, intended <word sense> and the original occurrence makes a <text corpus> analysis more reproducible than retaining only the normalized label.
Back to article page
