Muodostavan

Muodostavan is a grammatical form in Finnish. It is the genitive singular form of the present active participle muodostava, which comes from the verb muodostaa meaning “to form” or “to constitute.” As a participle, muodostava functions as an adjective and can modify a noun in attributive position. When declined as genitive singular, muodostavan appears in noun phrases to express ideas such as “the forming of X” or “the X that forms,” for example in the phrase muodostavan toiminnan, commonly translated as “the forming operation” or “the operation of forming.”

In usage, muodostavan primarily serves as an attributive form rather than a standalone noun. It forms part of a larger syntactic unit with a following noun in genitive or other case forms, depending on the phrase’s grammatical role. This contrasts with the nominal noun forms like muodostus or muodostaminen, which are more explicit nouns referring to the act or process of formation.

Finnish participles, including muodostava and its genitive muodostavan, decline like adjectives, so other forms would include muodostavan (genitive singular), muodostavaa (partitive singular), muodostavan (nominative plural as a separate form for agreement), and so on. The related non-participial forms are the past active participle muodostatnut or the passive past participle muodostettu, which have distinct meanings and usage.

See also: muodostaa, present active participle (Finnish grammar), participles in Finnish.