citation form

noun

, Linguistics.

1. the spoken form a word has when produced in isolation, such as when cited for purposes of illustration, as distinguished from the form it would have when produced in the normal stream of speech.
2. the form of a lexical set that represents its entire inflectional paradigm in linguistic discussions and dictionary entries:

   “Be” is the citation form for “be,” “am,” “is,” “are,” “was,” “were,” “been.”

Example Sentences

In my time as a law student the professors had, unlike today, tended to identify more closely with the legal profession than with the university professoriate.They thus were far less interdisciplinary for errors in citation form.The legal profession’s obsession with citation form is beyond absurd.

From Salon