Alapszavát

Alapszavát is a linguistic term used in Hungarian to denote the base word form, or lemma, of a lexeme. It represents the canonical form that is typically cited in dictionaries and used as the reference form for inflected variants. In practice, alapszavát serves as the anchor against which other forms of the same word are grouped and analyzed.

In Hungarian linguistic terminology, alapszavát is closely related to the concept of a lemma, though exact usage can vary among authors. It is not always identical to the word’s most reduced morphological core (the root), but rather to the form chosen as the standard citation form. For verbs, the alapszavát is usually the infinitive form (for example, írni “to write”); for nouns, it is typically the singular nominative (for example, kutya “dog”); for adjectives, the base form is often the uninflected or attributive form (for example, nagy “big”). Other inflected forms are generated from the alapszavát by adding appropriate suffixes or alterations.

The concept is widely used in dictionaries, language teaching, and natural language processing. In corpora and computational tools, lemmatization maps every inflected form to its alapszavát to consolidate word occurrences and analyze morphology, syntax, or meaning at the level of the base form.

See also: lemma, root, stem, inflection. Note that terminology and exact definitions can vary by linguistic tradition, and alapszavát is most often described within the broader discussion of lemmas and base forms in Hungarian linguistics.