kiertymäsanan

Kiertymäsana is a hypothetical term used in linguistic discussions to describe a word form whose derivational potential is organized around a cyclic or rotating set of affixes. The word itself comes from the Finnish kiertymä, meaning rotation or turning, coupled with sana, meaning word. In this sense, kiertymäsana refers to a word whose related forms are generated by permuting, rotating, or cycling a fixed sequence of morphemes around a base root. The concept is not a standard category in mainstream morphology, but it is sometimes employed in teaching materials or theoretical works to illustrate circular rules and cyclic derivation processes.

In a typical framework, a kiertymäsana consists of a core stem and a finite set of affixes or derivational slots that can be arranged in different orders. Each rotation yields a distinct surface form, which may carry a different grammatical category or semantic relation. Some rotations may produce valid words in a language, while others may be morphologically ill-formed or phonotactically unlikely. The study of kiertymäsana thus highlights how word formation can be constrained by both phonology and morphology, and how cyclic ordering of morphemes can influence meaning and part of speech.

Examples are often abstract in discussions of kiertymäsana. A hypothetical root w with an affix set {A, B, C} could yield forms w-A-B-C, w-B-C-A, and w-C-A-B, with only certain rotations attested in a given linguistic system. The concept serves as a useful thought experiment for cyclic rules, derivational symmetry, and the limits of morphological productivity. See also derivational morphology, cyclic morphology, and morphophonology.