Monikkomääritelmä

Monikkomääritelmä is a term used in linguistics and lexicography to describe the rules and criteria that determine how the plural form of a word is derived in a given language. It specifies the conditions under which plurality is marked, the morphological process that produces the plural (suffixes, internal stem changes, or suppletion), and how irregular plural forms are handled. A monikkomääritelmä typically comprises a lemma (base form), a plural stem or affix, any phonological or orthographic adjustments, and a list of irregular plurals or plural classes. The purpose is to enable generation of correct plural forms from the lemma and to annotate data in corpora, dictionaries, and language-processing tools such as morphological analyzers and generators.

In practice, monikkomääritelmä is language-specific. For example, many noun plurals in Finnish are formed by adding a suffix that marks number, with possible stem alternations; adjectives and pronouns agree in number with the noun. Other languages may have multiple plural classes, reduplication, or no explicit plural marking at all. When a language exhibits exceptions, the monikkomääritelmä records these irregulars and the contexts in which they occur.

As a documentation and computational tool, the concept supports linguistic description as well as natural language processing, providing a compact specification for how pluralization should behave across forms and inflected paradigms. The term itself reflects a focus on the definition of plurality rather than any single surface form.