Viittausmuoto

Viittausmuoto, or citation form in linguistics, is the form of a word that is used as the reference form for analysis, dictionaries, and indexing. It is typically the form from which other inflected forms are derived, serving as the base form or lemma for the lexeme.

The choice of viittausmuoto depends on the language and its morphology. In many languages, the viittausmuoto is the dictionary form that users would look up. For Finnish, the common practice is that nouns are listed in their singular nominative form (for example, talo “house” as the viittausmuoto for related inflected forms like talossa, taloja, taloa). For verbs, the viittausmuoto is often the infinitive or a standard dictionary form (for example, juosta “to run” or olla “to be”). Adjectives and their associated nouns are usually indexed by the base adjective form (for example, pieni “small”).

In practical use, viittausmuoto is central to lemmatization, a process in linguistics and natural language processing that reduces inflected word forms to their base form. This enables consistent counting, searching, and linguistic analysis across different morpho-syntactic variants. The exact definition of the viittausmuoto can vary between languages and lexicographic conventions, but it generally corresponds to what many languages call the lemma or base form.

Examples illustrate the concept: English uses “go” as the lemma for “went” or “going”; Finnish uses “talo” as the lemma for “talon,” “talossa,” or “talot,” and “juosta” as the lemma for various inflected forms of the verb.