perusmerkitystä

Perusmerkitys is a linguistic concept referring to the core or primary sense of a word or expression. It denotes the most prototypical, central meaning that anchors the word’s other related senses. In lexicography and semantics, perusmerkitys is often treated as the first or most salient sense listed in a dictionary and as the reference point for understanding polysemy and semantic relations.

Determination of the perusmerkitys can vary. It is not a fixed property of a word in all contexts; it can be influenced by frequency in corpora, speaker intuition, and historical usage. Different languages or communities may disagree on what constitutes the basic sense, and the perusmerkitys can shift over time as language evolves or as domain-specific usage changes.

Relation to polysemy and semantic change. Many words have several related senses. The perusmerkitys represents the central sense from which other meanings extend, whether through metaphor, metonymy, or specialized usage. Identifying it helps in understanding how newer or more specific senses relate to the common foundation of the word.

Finnish usage. In Finnish linguistic and dictionary contexts, perusmerkitys denotes the core meaning, while perusmerkitystä is the partitive form used when the meaning is discussed or analyzed as an object, for example in descriptions or evaluations of a word’s meaning.

Overall, perusmerkitys provides a practical lens for examining how words convey their fundamental concept, even as meanings diversify across contexts.