jäsensanalla

Jäsensanalla is a term used in Finnish linguistics and language technology to refer to the base form or stem of a word from which inflected or derived forms are built. It denotes the core part of the word that carries the essential meaning, excluding most inflectional endings and, in some analyses, excluding derivational prefixes or suffixes.

In practice, jäsensanalla is used to separate form from function in morphological analysis. It helps linguists and language-processing tools distinguish the semantic content of a word from grammatical information such as case, number, tense, mood, or voice. The concept is closely related to, but not always identical to, lemmas or stems, depending on the analytic framework. Some frameworks treat the jäsensanalla as the same as the stem used for word formation, while others reserve lemmas for dictionary forms and use a separate stem form for inflection.

Different linguistic traditions may define the jäsensanalla with slight variations. For Finnish, a commonly convenient representation is that the jäsensanalla corresponds to a stem with a trailing marker used in word formation, for example tal- as the jäsensanalla of talo (house) and puhu- as the jäsensanalla of puhua (to speak). These forms are then combined with inflectional endings to produce the full word forms found in text.

Usage extends beyond theoretical linguistics into education, language pedagogy, and computational linguistics, where jäsensanalla supports systematic word parsing, dictionary construction, and natural language processing workflows. See also: lemma, stem, root word.