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As we have already seen senseRelation to relate different senses of a lexical entry, and lexicalVariant to relate different lexical entries, we will also introduce a third property formVariant, which relates different forms of the same lexical entries. This property can often be ignored, as the preferred way to represent form variants is by attaching an appropriate set of linguistic properties. However an alternative way to represent the entry “animal” with a plural “animals” is using a formVariant link.
:animal lemon:canonicalForm :animal_sing_form ; lemon:otherForm :animal_plural_form . :animal_sing_form lemon:writtenRep "animal"@en ; :pluralFormOf :animal_plural_form . :animal_plural_form lemon:writtenRep "animals"@en . :pluralFormOf rdfs:subPropertyOf lemon:formVariant .
We leave it to the implementation of software using the lemon model to choose which method to use, however we observe that the property/value modelling is generally more compact than form relations.