Lõpetatust

Lõpetatust is an Estonian nominal form related to the verb lõpetama ("to finish, to complete"). It denotes the state, result or quality of something having been finished; morphologically it is connected to the deverbal suffix -tus, which forms abstract nouns expressing a condition or outcome. The specific form lõpetatust is the partitive singular of lõpetatus (or of the nominal stem), and is used according to Estonian case and aspectual rules.

Grammatically, the partitive case in Estonian marks partialness, indefinite quantity, ongoingness, objects of negation and certain postpositional relations. As such, lõpetatust appears in constructions that require the partitive: for example, when speaking of an unspecified degree of completion, when the noun functions as an object of a negative verb, or after numerals and quantifiers that take the partitive. Related forms include lõpetatus (nominative), lõpetatuse (genitive) and the verbal participle lõpetatud.

In usage, the concept expressed by lõpetatust can appear in administrative, academic and everyday contexts where the emphasis is on the condition or extent of completion—project completion, finished works, formal termination of processes. Synonymous or alternative expressions in Estonian include lõpetamine (the act of finishing) and lõpetatud (finished, as an adjective), which differ in aspect and syntactic behavior.