Käänetusvorm

Käänetusvorm is an Estonian linguistic term referring to an inflected form of a word. In linguistic usage, a käänetusvorm (plural: käänetusvormid) is a surface form that expresses grammatical categories such as case, number, person, tense, mood, or definiteness. The concept distinguishes these forms from the lemma, which is the dictionary or base form from which inflected forms are derived. A single lemma may have many käänetusvormid, organized into a paradigm or declension/conjugation system.

In languages with rich morphology, including Estonian and other Finnic languages, käänetusvormid encode grammatical relations directly within the word rather than through word order. For nouns, forms differ by case and number; for verbs, by person, number, tense, aspect, mood, voice, and sometimes polarity. Inflected forms arise through endings, stem changes, or vowel harmony in some languages. Morphological analysis or parsing of texts typically involves identifying the käänetusvorm of each word.

Usage in grammars and dictionaries describes the set of possible käänetusvormid for a word as its paradigm or declension/conjugation. Understanding käänetusvorms is essential for language learning, computational linguistics, and text analysis where grammatical function must be determined. See also inflection, declension, conjugation, paradigm.