Erimuotojen

Erimuotojen is a Finnish term that literally means “different forms” and is used in linguistics to describe the various inflected or morphologically variant forms a word may take. In practical use, erimuotojen refers to the set of alternate forms a lexeme can assume across grammatical categories such as tense, number, case, mood, or voice, as well as derivational variants. The term derives from eri- meaning “different” and muoto meaning “form,” with the genitive plural ending -jen.

In linguistic descriptions, erimuotojen is used to discuss how a word changes to fit its syntactic role and how its forms relate to a lemma or dictionary headword. The concept is central to morphology, the study of word structure, and is relevant for analyzing inflectional systems in languages with rich morphology as well as those with simpler paradigms. For learners and lexicographers, noting erimuotojen helps in understanding how words behave in different contexts and in recognizing or producing all the forms of a word.

Examples can illustrate the idea: a noun may have erimuotojen for singular and plural as well as for different cases; a verb may have erimuotojen for tense, person, and mood; a derived word may have several related erimuotojen forms indicating participation, negation, or comparison.

See also: inflection, morphology, declension, conjugation, headword.