Sõnavormi

Sõnavormi is a term used in Estonian linguistics to describe any inflected form that a word can take in actual usage. It denotes the surface form a lexeme assumes to express grammatical features such as number, case, tense, mood, person, or degree. The concept distinguishes a word’s root or lemma (the dictionary form) from the various forms that may appear in sentences.

In Estonian, word forms cover several word classes. Nouns and pronouns inflect for case and number, producing different forms to indicate syntactic roles and possessive relations. Verbs have a rich system of finite and non-finite forms, encoding tense, aspect, mood, voice, person, and number. Adjectives form degree or comparison and often agree with the noun they modify in number and case. Verbal participles and infinitives are non-finite forms used in subordinate clauses, compound tenses, and noun-like constructions.

The study of sõnavormid is central to grammar, teaching, and language processing. Analyzing word forms helps determine a word’s lemma, syntactic function, and semantic contribution within a sentence. In dictionaries and language resources, each entry may list the base form plus representative sõnavormid or provide rules for generating the full paradigm of a word.

In practical use, recognizing different sõnavormid enables correct agreement, word order decisions, and meaning interpretation. It is also a focus in Estonian language technology, including morphological analyzers and part-of-speech tagging, where identifying the exact form of a word is essential for understanding text.