Illatiiviillatiivin

Illatiiviillatiivin is a term encountered in some Finnish-language grammars and typological discussions to describe a theoretical construction that combines illative and allative case meanings in a single inflected form. Illatiivi refers to the illative case, which marks movement into a destination (into something), while allatiivi (allative) marks movement toward or onto a location. The compound term illatiiviillatiivin is used to discuss how suffixes could be layered or interact in languages that employ extensive locative morphology.

In practice, illatiiviillatiivin is not an officially recognized standard form in contemporary Finnish grammar. Finnish normally expresses into- and toward-relations with separate forms (for example, illative vs. allative) rather than a single fused morpheme. The concept is primarily of interest in descriptive and cross-linguistic linguistics as a way to think about morpheme order, semantic layering, and the limits of suffix chaining. It can also serve as a teaching tool to illustrate how multiple locative meanings might be encoded in highly agglutinative systems.

Possible discussions around illatiiviillatiivin focus on questions such as how a stem would behave if an illative suffix were followed by an allative suffix, what semantic nuance would result from combining the two, and how such a hypothetical form would be phonologically and morphologically realized. The term thereby helps frame comparisons between Finnish and other languages with richer multi-case systems.

See also: illatiivi, allatiivi, locative case, suffix chaining, Finnish grammar, typology.