szóalak

Szóalak is a linguistic term used to describe the concrete form of a word as it appears in actual usage. A szóalak includes the inflectional endings and derivational affixes attached to a lexeme, and, in written text, its orthographic realization such as capitalization and diacritics. It represents a specific surface realization of a word, as opposed to the lemma or canonical dictionary form.

In contrast to the lemma, which is the base form stored in dictionaries, a szóalak is one instantiation of a word within a particular grammatical context. A single lemma can have many szóalak, reflecting different grammatical categories such as tense, number, case, mood, or degree. For example, the noun ház (house) has forms like ház (nominative singular, lemma), házat (definite accusative singular), házban (in the house), and házakban (in the houses). The verb ír (to write) yields forms such as írok (I write) and írtam (I wrote). The adjective nagy (big) can yield szóalakit such as nagyobb (bigger) and legnagyobb (biggest).

Szóalak is a central concept in morphology, lexicography, and language technology. It is used in morphological analysis and part-of-speech tagging to describe how a word appears in a given context. In corpora and natural language processing, algorithms often generate or identify szóalak from lemmas to understand syntactic and semantic relationships. The study of szóalalak thus helps bridge dictionaries, grammar, and computational models of language.