word form

Thesaurus

Noun

word form - the phonological or orthographic sound or appearance of a word that can be used to describe or identify something; "the inflected forms of a word can be represented by a stem and a list of inflections to be attached"descriptor, form, signifierlinguistics - the scientific study of languageword - a unit of language that native speakers can identify; "words are the blocks from which sentences are made"; "he hardly said ten words all morning"plural, plural form - the form of a word that is used to denote more than onesingular, singular form - the form of a word that is used to denote a singletonghost word - a word form that has entered the language through the perpetuation of an errorroot word, stem, root, theme, radical, base - (linguistics) the form of a word after all affixes are removed; "thematic vowels are part of the stem"etymon, root - a simple form inferred as the common basis from which related words in several languages can be derived by linguistic processescitation form, entry word, main entry word - the form of a word that heads a lexical entry and is alphabetized in a dictionaryabbreviation - a shortened form of a word or phraseacronym - a word formed from the initial letters of the several words in the name

Word Form

a word operating in a particular grammatical form. For example, gorodóv (“of the cities”) is the word form of the genitive plural of the noun gorod (“city”). Any grammatical paradigm of a word constitutes the system of its word forms, and in actual utterances any word subject to inflection appears in a specific word form.

In Soviet linguistics, the theory of the word form was developed by A. I. Smirnitskii, who elaborated the views of F. F. Fortunatov, A. M. Peshkovskii, and V. A. Bogoroditskii. Smirnitskii distinguished three aspects in the structure of a word form: the individualizing (lexical) aspect, which is expressed by the word’s root, the class (specifically grammatical) aspect, and the strictly formal aspect (the actual grammatical form). An example of the class and formal aspects is the inflectional ending of the word form gorodov.

Word Form

(1) The aggregate of the morphological and phonological markers of a word that determine its grammatical meaning. For example, the morphemes of the Russian word uchitel’nitsa (uchi-tel’-nits-a, “teacher”) indicate that it is a singular feminine noun in the nominative case. In the Afar language of Ethiopia, the phonological characteristics of the word fak indicate that it is an imperative second person singular verb form, since that is the only grammatical form which ends in a consonant. The concept of word form originated as part of the formal morphological approach to language developed by F. F. Fortunatov. To Fortunatov, word form was a word’s divisibility into morphemes that permits the word’s grammatical meaning to be determined.

(2) A word in particular grammatical form. For example, the Russian stolu is the dative singular form of the noun stol (“table”).

word form

noun

Synonyms for word form

noun the phonological or orthographic sound or appearance of a word that can be used to describe or identify something

Synonyms

descriptor
form
signifier

Related Words

linguistics
word
plural
plural form
singular
singular form
ghost word
root word
stem
root
theme
radical
base
etymon
citation form
entry word
main entry word
abbreviation
acronym