Lemmas

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Searching for lemmas and word families

The traditional hierarchy of morphology.

Lemma

A lemma is a group of words created through inflectional processes – the yellow half.

How many word forms does a regular verb consist of?

worry, worries, worrying, worried.

How many word forms does an irregular verb consist of?

cut cuts cutting

bring brings bringing brought

sink sinks sinking sank sunk

How many word forms does a regular adjective consist of?

            steep steeper steepest

Fortunately, you don’t have to enter the full lemma to find it. Simply type @ after your word.

Try searches on precede@, contribute@, fast@, knife@, corpus@, simple@

Word Family

A word family is a group of words created through word formation processes– the blue half above. It is less precisely determined than the lemma. Use the wildcard symbol (the asterisk) to find any string of letters that follows what you enter.

Since the wildcard finds anything starting with your entry, a search such as mid* or mon* will return quite various results. Try it.

For observing prefixes at work, you could search mega*, under*, mis*, etc. Unfortunately, it is not possible in the CCS to search with wildcard first, e.g. *ness, *wise, *fold, *ish.