Tarkoittavan

Tarkoittavan is the genitive singular form of the Finnish active present participle tarkoittava, which is derived from the verb tarkoittaa, meaning to mean or to intend. As a present participle, tarkoittava expresses ongoing meaning or intention and functions as an adjective or, in some contexts, as a noun phrase element. The form tarkoittavan is used when the participle-modified noun appears in the genitive case or when the participial phrase needs to link to another word in a genitive construction.

In Finnish grammar, present active participles like tarkoittava behave like adjectives. They agree with the noun they modify in number and case, taking the appropriate endings. The base form tarkoittava is the nominative singular; tarkoittavan is the genitive singular; tarkoittavaa is the partitive singular, and so on. Because of this, tarkoittavan commonly appears in phrases where the noun it describes is in a genitive relationship, for example in noun phrases such as tarkoittavan lauseen sisältö “the content of the sentence that means/intends.”

Usage of tarkoittavan is most frequent in written Finnish, especially in linguistic, editorial, or technical contexts, where concise description of meaning or intention is required without a full relative clause. The nuance conveyed by tarkoittava/tarkoittavan is that the noun it modifies pertains to meaning or intention in an ongoing sense, rather than a completed action.

Example: Tarkoittavan lauseen sisältö paljastaa kirjoittajan tarkoituksen. This translates roughly to “the content of the sentence that intends/means conveys the author’s intention.”