formsuch

Formsuch is a term used in linguistics and natural language processing to refer to an operator or function that generates a word form that satisfies a given set of morphosyntactic constraints. It is not a standard name for a specific algorithm; rather, it appears in theoretical discussions, teaching examples, and prototype libraries as a way to describe the act of inflecting or conjugating a lemma.

The name combines form and such, intended as a mnemonic for “form such that.” In practice, a formsuch-like function would take a lemma or base form and a feature specification (tense, aspect, mood, person, number, gender, case) and return the correctly inflected form or a short list of acceptable forms. The concept is used to illustrate how form generation can be constrained by grammatical features rather than by surface strings alone.

In linguistic morphology and computational linguistics, formsuch is discussed in relation to inflectional paradigms, paradigm generation, and morphological analyzers. It serves as a conceptual model for rule-based form generation and is often contrasted with statistical or neural generation methods, where forms emerge from learned models rather than explicit rules.

Examples:

formsuch(lemma="speak", features={"tense":"past"}) -> "spoke"

formsuch(lemma="be", features={"tense":"present","person":3,"number":"singular"}) -> "is"

formsuch(lemma="go", features={"tense":"present","person":3,"number":"singular"}) -> "goes"

See also: morphology, inflection, conjugation, lemmatization, natural language generation.