juurlõpp

Juurlõpp is a term used in Estonian linguistics to describe the relationship between the stem of a word (juur) and its inflectional ending (lõpp) in formed word forms. The concept emphasizes how a word's root combines with suffixes to signal grammatical categories such as case, number, or tense.

In morphological analysis, juurlõpp helps to separate the core stem from the attached ending. This separation supports linguistic tasks such as lemmatization, parsing, and the development of language technologies, including morphological analyzers and part-of-speech taggers for Estonian.

The approach is commonly applied to Estonian because many inflectional forms are created by adding suffixes to stems. By modeling words as a stem plus an ending, researchers can study regular patterns as well as irregular forms, and it can aid computational processing and linguistic description.

Limitations and variation: Not all inflected words fit a simple stem-ending model, and some researchers argue for broader or different frameworks that incorporate stem alterations or derivational morphology. The term juurlõpp may be used in some linguistic traditions, but its usage is not universal, and alternative terminology exists in the field.

Related topics include Estonian language morphology, inflection, and morphological analysis.