Hi Thad! "Il faut cultiver notre jardin." [https://againstprofphil.org/2 017/02/20/il-faut-cultiver-notre-jardin/] I did add a contracted form to a lexeme few weeks ago, just to test the water. (https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Lexeme:L1883&dif f=1248168703.) Specifically, this was "'m" as a contraction of "am" and, therefore, a form of *be*. But, as is common with contractions, the form is permitted only in specific contexts (some languages, like French, *require* contractions in particular contexts, so we certainly can't ignore them). 1. I'm not convinced that "we'll" is a phrase. It is certainly a contraction (of either "we shall" or "we will"). My understanding is that a *lexical phrase* would only be admitted as a lexeme if its definition (including its inflection) is not fully implied by its constituents. And I suggest that is not the case here. Rather, it is justified as a lexeme by the fact that it is a contraction (personally, I don't entirely agree with this justification in this particular case, because "'ll" is practically a separate word in contemporary English, but perhaps that 'll be a topic for another day). 2. From 1, "we'll" has three forms: "we'll", "we shall" and "we will". But these are not inflections, so perhaps they aren't strictly *forms* at all. Semantics aside, "we'll" is neither more nor less than "we" followed by "'ll", with the orthographic convention of no intervening space where a word begins with an apostrophe (unless 'tis an exception). Anyway... What sort of function did you have in mind? My theory would be that only a parsing function would start with "we'll" and its result is ambiguous because "'ll" is ambiguous (being a form in two separate lexemes, *shall* and *will)*. Since you mention searching, I'd guess that a search would want to find results containing any one of the three forms, given "we'll", but only the given form and "we'll", given either of the other forms. Since you also mention "equivalency", I would say that there is equivalence between "we'll" and "we shall", and there is equivalence between "we'll" and "we will", but there is no (implied) equivalence between "we shall" and "we will". (For a clearer case, consider "we'd", which might mean "we had" or "we should" or "we would". You might suspect equivalence between "we should" and "we would" but not between either and "we had". So it is not the common form of the contraction that implies the suspected equivalence, it is the fading/faded distinction between *shall* and *will*, facilitated by common contractions.) Since you mention renderers, I would say not. But that's not a definitive no. It's more a case of we'll build that bridge when we get to where it isn't ;) A rendering function should be expected to leave the matter of contraction 'til later (which, like tomorrow, never comes). According to this theory, there might come a time when a renderer function has (in effect) "we shall" and returns "we'll", but not the other way around. (And according to my principle of losslessness, the result is actually both: "we'll<!--optional contraction of: we shall-->", in essence.) 3. No idea! (Just saying...) Just to backtrack to your use case, I'd be inclined to lemmatize the entire phrase. My millennial Collins English Dictionary has sense 32 for *cross*: "cross a bridge when one comes to it". My Oxford Dictionary of English has the phrase "cross that bridge when one comes to it" under *bridge*. One never says "one", of course! There seem to be five or six occurrences in the British National Corpus. Five say "cross that bridge when"; three are for "we" (one attributive modifying "attitude", one imperative: "let's cross that bridge when we *get* to it, one: "we can cross..."), one each for "he" and "she" "would" (in the same text but not close together), and one, well... "we cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us..." (Why, thank you, Sir Tom! https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Tom_Stoppard) Thank you for "listening", Al. On Saturday, 29 August 2020, Thad Guidry &lt;thadguidry(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: