Genetiivimuotonsa

Genetiivimuotonsa is a Finnish linguistic term that literally means “its genitive form.” It refers to the genitive form of a noun that is described with a third-person possessive suffix. The form is built by taking the base genetiivimuoto (the genitive form) and adding the third-person possessive suffix -nsä, resulting in genetiivimuotonsa. The construction is mainly discussed in descriptive grammar, dictionaries, and language-education contexts to illustrate how possession and case inflection interact in Finnish.

In practice, genetiivimuotonsa is a meta-form used when describing a word’s own genitive form. For example, one may say that a noun’s genitive form is koiran, and refer to that form as the genetiivimuotonsa of koira in a grammatical discussion. The concept highlights how Finnish frequently combines case endings with possessive suffixes to encode relation and ownership within a single noun phrase.

Formation and scope: genetiivimuotonsa is created by appending the third-person possessive suffix -nsä to the noun’s genitive form. This yields a compound that literally means “its genitive form.” The term is primarily encountered in linguistic analyses, grammatical explanations, and theoretical illustrations rather than in everyday speech, where speakers typically use standard genitive forms without explicitly naming them as genetiivimuotonsa.

See also: Finnish grammar, genitive case, possessive suffixes, nominal morphology, descriptive linguistics.