sanamuodon

Sanamuodon is a linguistic term used to describe the surface form of a word as it appears in actual text or speech. It includes all inflected or derived variants created by the morphological processes of a language, such as affixation, internal vowel changes, reduplication, or compounding. The sanamuodon of a word is the form that is realized in a specific grammatical context, and may differ from the lemma or dictionary form, which is the base form used to represent the word in lexicons.

In grammatical description, sanamuodon is contrasted with the lemma and with the underlying form that may be hypothesized by morphologists. A single lemma can have multiple sanamuodon depending on tense, mood, number, case, voice, person, aspect, or derivational category.

Examples illustrate the concept. In English, the verb walk has sanamuodon such as walk, walks, walking, walked; the noun child has children as its alternative sanamuodon. Some languages exhibit strong stem changes or suppletion. In Indonesian and many related languages, word formation often relies on affixation to create new sanamuodon from a base root, e.g., makan (to eat) → memakan, dimakan, makanan, pemakan.

The study of sanamuodon informs morphology, morphosyntax, and computational linguistics, where recognizing the correct surface form is essential for parsing, generation, and lexicon design.