formsoccurs

Formsoccurs is a term used in linguistics and corpus analysis to denote the distribution pattern of a given surface form across a text collection or in a particular linguistic context. It is not a universally standardized term, but a compact label for tracking how often a form appears.

Definition and scope: A form refers to a concrete realization of a word’s morphology (for example, "run," "ran," "running") or any token in a corpus. Occurs indicates occurrences in a dataset, window, or context. In analyses, formsoccurs can be measured as absolute counts, relative frequencies, or probabilistic scores, sometimes normalized by context size or by lemma.

Calculation and methods: Common methods include tokenization, lemmatization, and part-of-speech tagging to group forms. Relative frequency is count(form)/total tokens. Probability estimates may be obtained via maximum likelihood or Bayesian smoothing, and results can be conditioned on context such as tense, mood, or syntactic function.

Applications: Formsoccurs data supports morphological analysis, language modeling, lexicon design, and cross-language comparison. It helps identify irregular inflection patterns, allomorphy, and the dispersion of forms across genres.

Example: In English, formsoccurs would quantify the distribution of forms of "be" (am, is, are, was, were, be, being, been) across a corpus, revealing usage patterns by genre or period.

Limitations and relation: The measure depends on corpus quality, tokenization, and disambiguation; it interacts with lemmas, stems, and POS tagging. It relates to standard frequency measures and can complement concordance studies.