Lematy

Lematy is the plural form of lemma in linguistic usage, most commonly encountered in Polish and related languages. In this sense, lematy refer to the canonical base forms of words that function as headwords in dictionaries and linguistic analyses. A lemma represents the form under which a word is typically listed and from which its inflected or derived forms are generated.

In linguistics and lexicography, the selection of a lemma depends on the language and the analysis being performed. For verbs, the lemma is often the infinitive; for nouns, the singular nominative is frequently chosen; for adjectives, the positive base form is commonly used. Lematy thus serve as units of meaning that unify all inflected variants of a word.

In practical applications, lemmatization maps various surface forms to their corresponding lematy. This process reduces morphological variation and improves tasks such as search, information retrieval, machine translation, and corpus linguistics. For example, the forms running, ran, and runs are mapped to the lemma run; in Polish, forms like biegnę, biegniesz, biegł map to the lemma biegać, depending on tagging and analysis conventions.

Etymology: the term lemma derives from Greek lêmma, meaning a premise or assumption, and entered modern languages through historical linguistic scholarship. The plural form lematy reflects Polish pluralization patterns, whereas in Greek contexts the standard plural is lemata.

See also: Lemma (linguistics); Lemmatization; Headword; Inflection.