sanapohjan

Sanapohja is a term used in Finnish linguistics to refer to the base form or stem of a word—the form to which inflectional endings are attached and from which related forms are built. In many analyses the sanapohja represents the underlying morpheme carrying the core semantic content, before suffixes and other affixes are added.

In practice, sanapohja is closely related to what is often called the lemma or dictionary form, but there can be distinctions depending on the linguistic framework. The perusmuoto (basic form) is typically the form recorded in dictionaries, and it is frequently used as the sanapohja in everyday language study. However, in some analyses the sanapohja may be a slightly different underlying stem that remains after stripping certain derivational affixes; the exact definition can vary by theoretical tradition.

Identification of the sanapohja is a tool in both education and computational linguistics. For language learners, recognizing the sanapohja helps with understanding how words are formed and how meanings relate across inflected forms. In natural language processing, algorithms such as stemmers and lemmatizers aim to recover the sanapohja to group inflected forms under a common base for tasks like search, tagging, and syntactic parsing.

Example: for the word kissan (genitive of kissa, “cat”), the sanapohja is commonly taken as kissa. For talossa (in the house), many analyses treat talo as the sanapohja. The exact handling can depend on the rules adopted by a given linguistic framework.

See also: perusmuoto, lemmas, sanamuoto, morfologia.