Vormcategorie

Vormcategorie, literally “form category,” is a linguistic term referring to the set of grammatical features that a word form encodes within a language. It is a key concept in morphology and morpho-syntax, signaling the functions a word form can express, such as tense, number, case, mood, or other grammatical roles. Vormcategorie help describe how languages organize and mark words to convey information about time, agreement, and grammatical relations.

Typical form categories include tense, aspect, mood, person, number, gender, case, voice, definiteness, and degree. Some categories are realized through inflectional changes within the word (suffixes, prefixes, or internal vowel changes); others are expressed by separate particles or by word order in more analytic languages. The prominence and inventory of form categories vary across language types: fusional, agglutinative, and isolating languages each realize form categories in different ways, from rich inflection to minimal marking.

Examples illustrate the variety of form categories. In English, the verb form walk encodes tense and agreement: walk, walks, walked, walking. Noun forms distinguish number (dog vs. dogs). Adjectives can show degree (fast, faster, fastest). In Dutch, forms such as loop, loopt, liep, gelopen illustrate present, third-person singular, past, and past participle. Some languages encode many form categories through extensive inflection, while others rely more on function words or syntax and have little morphologically marked inflection.

In linguistics and related fields, vormcategorie are used to classify languages, compare morphological systems, and analyze interfaces between morphology and syntax. In natural language processing, identifying relevant form categories supports tagging, parsing, translation, and other linguistic tasks.