Kääntyvän

Kääntyvän is a Finnish grammatical form derived from the verb kääntyä, meaning to turn or bend. It is specifically the genitive singular form of the present active participle kääntyvä, which conveys the sense of something that is turning or twisting. As a participle, kääntyvä (and its inflected forms) functions as an adjective, describing a noun and agreeing with it in case and number.

In practice, kääntyvän is used to form attributive phrases where the participle modifies a noun in the genitive singular. For example, in the phrase kääntyvän miehen varjo, the word kääntyvän modifies miehen (the man’s) in the genitive singular, producing a sense akin to “the turning man’s shadow.” Such constructions are common in descriptive or possessive noun phrases and can appear in relative clauses as well.

The base lemma is kääntyvä, from which various inflected forms arise to align with Finnish case systems. A common related form is kääntyvää, the partitive singular, which occurs in different syntactic contexts where the noun-phrase is in partitive.

Etymologically, kääntyvän follows the standard Finnish pattern of forming present active participles by adding the suffix -va/-vä to the verb stem and then declining the participle like an adjective. This allows it to express ongoing action or state linked to a noun without using a separate clause.

In summary, kääntyvän is a genitive singular form of the present active participle kääntyvä, used to describe or attribute a noun within a possessive or descriptive phrase, reflecting a continuing action or state of turning.