Formsomitido

Formsomitido is a term used in linguistics and natural language processing to denote an inflected word form that is not realized in the surface form of a sentence, but is implied by the language’s grammar or intended by the speaker. The expression is a calque of forma omitida in Spanish and is not a universally standardized label across grammars or annotation schemes; its exact use can vary by project.

In descriptive linguistics, formsomitido signals that a slot in an inflectional paradigm remains empty in a given utterance due to phenomena such as elision, cliticization, or phonological reduction. In corpus annotation and NLP, it marks missing surface forms in data, enabling analysts and models to account for ellipsis, data gaps, or under-specified forms without assuming a concrete realization.

Representation and conventions: annotation practices differ. Some schemes encode a formsomitido as a placeholder token or a null value in morphological fields; others use explicit tags such as formsomitido to label the missing form. The choice of representation depends on the annotation framework and the downstream applications for the data.

Examples: in a tagged Spanish corpus, a sentence like “Yo comí, y tú [formsomitido]” may indicate that the second-person preterite form is omitted in the utterance, while the full paradigm would include “comiste.” In English, a verb tense might be omitted in casual speech; the formsomitido tag would document the omission for analysis or model training.

See also: ellipsis, zero form, inflection, corpus linguistics, natural language processing.