Questions of nomenclature

[alice]

In an idle moment recently I started to sketch out a relational database schema which would allow inflections to be generated in connection with an SCA. This soon grew uncomfortably hairy, and additionally my lack of formal linguistic training revealed itself when I realised I didn't actually know what to call some things. So:

1. What is the correct term for an individual member of a paradigm? insecta, insectam, insectae and amo, amas, amavi are all "somethings", but what?
2. If nouns, verbs, and adjectives are "inflectional categories", what are "nominative case", "feminine gender", "past tense", "third person", "subjunctive mood" and so on?
3. Has anyone else ever tried anything like this?

[bradrn]

I wish I knew. FWIW when I made my own paradigm builder I used ‘grammeme’ for both (1) and (2); details are in the linked comments. But I’m not particularly happy about the nomenclature and would happily change it if I could find anything better.

[Zju]

1. I thought it was a 'wordform', but I just learned this isn't an actual word. Maybe declined words or inflection instances? We definitely need a term, if there isn't any. FWIW the Latin perfect passive participle of inflect is inflexus.
2. Grammemes. I disagree that this can be applied to 1., at it is a term with a specific meaning.
3. Bradrn apparently (didn't know that, nice), me and some other forum member years ago on the old board, though I cannot recall exactly who.

[Creyeditor]

1. A 'paradigm cell' is what I have seen, but also simply a 'member' of a paradigm.
2. I have seen the term 'lexical category' used for nouns and verbs. This leaves 'inflectional category' for case.

[Pabappa]

arguably, paradigm should be the term for the individual entries, and we could use something like paradixis for the whole thing, but we're stuck now because the word paradigm is well established in its current use. also it seems that the proper form of the word i want would in fact be paradeixis, which bumps up against an entirely different area of linguistics.

In a similarly pedantic view, *grammeme is an instance of bad ... well, grammar, ... because it's stacking two of the same morpheme together. The proper form of the word would be grapheme, but, well, there we go again bumping up against an existing term, this time an exact match rather than a close parallel.

Creyeditor's solutions seem best to me, but I'd also say that I've written some at least modestly detailed grammars of my languages without running into this problem at all, perhaps because I just use existing terms like stem, root, etc even when they're not specific.

[Travis B.]

1. I thought it was a 'wordform', but I just learned this isn't an actual word. Maybe declined words or inflection instances? We definitely need a term, if there isn't any. FWIW the Latin perfect passive participle of inflect is inflexus.

I always thought "wordform" was an actual word myself too.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

I might write it as "word form" or "word-form", but I'm pretty sure it exists.

[Zju]

Hmmm... then 'wordform' may exist after all, I would just have erred in the last moment before posting.

[Richard W]

I might write it as "word form" or "word-form", but I'm pretty sure it exists.

They're referred to as 'forms' on Wiktionary, but 'form' is also used for alternants such as color v. colour or rime v. rhyme.