Grammatikform

Grammatikform is a term used in linguistics to refer to a specific form of a word that encodes grammatical information. It is the realized surface shape of a lexeme when it reflects features such as tense, mood, aspect, person, number, case, gender, voice, or definiteness. The grammatical form is distinct from the lemma, which is the dictionary form of a word.

Forms arise through inflection or morphological changes, and they are often produced by affixes, internal stem alterations, or suppletion. Languages vary in how many grammatical features they encode in a form and how explicitly those features are marked. For example, in English the verb to run has forms such as run, runs, ran, and running, which signal person, number, and tense/aspect. In German, nouns decline for case and number (der Mann, des Mannes, die Männer), and verbs update their form for person and tense (geht, ging).

In linguistic analysis, grammatical forms help determine syntactic function and agreement. They allow a subject to agree with a verb, a determiner to align with a noun, and a pronoun to reference the appropriate antecedent. In cognitive and computational linguistics, grammatikform are often represented as morphosyntactic features, enabling parsing, part-of-speech tagging, and morphological analysis. The concept spans morphology and syntax and is central to understanding how languages encode grammatical relations in their word forms.