Nounformen

Nounformen (noun forms) are the inflected variants of a noun that encode grammatical information such as case, number, and gender. They also reflect language-specific features like possession or definiteness. Nounformen are a key part of morphology, the study of how words change form to express meaning.

In languages with rich inflection like German, nouns typically participate in declension. German nouns have four cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative) and two numbers (singular, plural). They belong to gender classes (masculine, feminine, neuter), which influences article and adjective endings rather than the noun stem itself in most cases.

Examples illustrate nounformen. In German, das Kind has singular nominative; des Kindes is genitive singular; dem Kind is dative singular; die Kinder is plural nominative. Plural formation can involve changes in spelling and vowel change (Mann → Männer) or regular endings (Auto → Autos; Stadt → Städte).

In linguistics and natural language processing, nounformen are analyzed by morphological parsers and lexicons. Lexical databases often store a lemma plus a paradigm listing all nounformen. Understanding nounformen is essential for proper agreement with determiners and adjectives and for parsing sentence structure.

Nounformen vary across languages; the term is often used in German grammar and in cross-linguistic morphology to refer to noun inflection.