Szóelemzés

Szóelemzés, or morpheme analysis, is the process of decomposing a word into its minimal meaningful units, or szóelemek. The goal is to identify the root (the base lexeme) and the attached affixes, and to describe their grammatical and semantic functions. Szóelemzés is a core task in Hungarian linguistics, lexicography, language teaching, and natural language processing, as it clarifies how a word’s form encodes meaning and grammatical relations.

In Hungarian, a highly inflected and agglutinative language, word formation relies primarily on suffixes that encode tense, mood, number, possession, case, and derivational meaning. A single word can contain a root plus a chain of suffixes, with each affix contributing a distinct function. The analysis must determine where the stem ends and where each affix begins, and whether affixes have allomorphic variants due to vowel harmony or phonological changes. Distinctions are often made between derivational suffixes, which create new words, and inflectional suffixes, which reflect grammatical features in context.

Example: the word könyvekben can be analyzed as könyv (root) + -ek (plural suffix) + -ben (inessive suffix). The process identifies the root, the plural marker -ek, and the locative suffix -ben, taking into account orthographic and phonological adjustments.

Practically, szóelemzés is supported by morphological dictionaries, suffixation rules, and computational models such as finite-state transducers. It underpins tasks in lexicography, language education, and natural language processing, including lemmatization, part-of-speech tagging, and parsing.