sananmuodon

Sananmuoto is a term in Finnish grammar that refers to the specific grammatical form a word can take in a sentence. It is the actual representation of a lexeme that encodes information such as number and case for nouns and adjectives, or tense, mood and person for verbs. The basic dictionary form of a word is called the perusmuoto or lemma; sananmuoto is one realization of that lemma in a given context.

In Finnish, nouns and adjectives inflect for number and a broad case system, while verbs conjugate for tense, mood, voice, person and number. Participles can also function as adjectives or nouns and have their own sananmuotot. Each lemma has a paradigm—a set of possible sananmuodot that can appear depending on syntactic role and grammatical context.

Examples help illustrate the concept. The noun koira (dog) can appear as different sananmuodot such as koira (nominative singular), koiran (genitive singular), koiria (partitive plural), koirissa (inessive singular), and koirien (genitive plural). The verb kirjoittaa (to write) has forms like kirjoitan (present first-person singular), kirjoitin (past first-person singular), and kirjoitetaan (passive present, third person).

Sananmuoto analysis is central in linguistics and language technology. It enables parsing, morphological tagging and syntactic disambiguation by focusing on the actual form a word takes rather than its base dictionary entry. Understanding sananmuoto helps explain how languages encode grammatical relationships and how words adapt to different roles within sentences.

See also: perusmuoto, taivutus, sananmuotojen taivutus, morphologia.