sananmuodossa

Sananmuodossa is a Finnish linguistic term referring to the form that a word takes in a sentence—the word’s inflected or derived form. The noun sananmuoto means a word form, and sananmuodossa translates roughly as “in the word form.” In linguistic descriptions it is used to distinguish a word’s surface form from its lemma, the canonical dictionary form.

In Finnish grammar, words are marked for various categories by inflection or derivation. Nouns and adjectives change for case and number, verbs for person, number, tense, mood, and voice, and pronouns also have case forms. The concept of sananmuodossa is applied when identifying or listing the exact form a lexeme appears in in context—for example talossa, which is the inessive singular form of talo; or puhuit, the past tense second person singular form of puhua. In language learning and corpus tagging, noting the sananmuodossa helps describe the word’s function in the sentence.

Sananmuoto- discussions also appear in dictionaries, which may present the base form (lemma) alongside common sanamuotoja (word forms). The term thus supports analysis in morphology, syntax, and language description, especially for morphologically rich languages like Finnish.

See also: Morphology, Lemma, Inflection, Finnish grammar, Part of speech.