Taivutettavuus

Taivutettavuus, or inflectability, is a linguistic property describing the extent to which a word can take inflectional endings to express grammatical information such as case, number, mood, tense, and voice. In Finnish linguistics, taivuttelu refers to how words change form to reflect their syntactic role in a sentence. The concept is central in studying morphology and the organization of a language’s inflectional system.

In Finnish, taivuttavuus is high for many word classes. Nouns and adjectives inflect for number and a wide range of cases, with a typical noun forming singular and plural varieties across numerous cases (for example nominative, genitive, inessive, illative, etc.). Verbs inflect for person and number in finite forms and also for mood and tense in non-finite forms; participles can function as adjectives and thus participate in inflection. The result is a rich system of word forms, where a single lemma may produce dozens or hundreds of surface forms.

Taivuttettavuuteen vaikuttavat sekä word class (nouns, verbs, adjectives, pronouns, numerals) että phonological and orthographic factors. Borrowed words may retain a reduced or specialized inflectional paradigm, and some fixed expressions or proper nouns exhibit limited or no further inflection. Irregular forms and phonological adaptations can also affect inflectability.

Understanding taivutettavuus is important for language learning, dictionary compilation, and natural language processing, where inflectional paradigms must be modeled to analyze and generate correct forms in Finnish.