Verbitapauksen

Verbitapauksen is a term occasionally encountered in discussions of Finnish grammar to refer to the grammatical form a verb takes in a clause. It is not a standard category in Finnish grammar; the official framework describes verbs in terms of conjugation, tense, mood, voice, aspect, person, and number, and distinguishes finite and non-finite forms rather than a separate "case" of a verb.

In use, the phrase may serve as a shorthand to discuss how a verb encodes syntactic function, such as subject agreement or temporal information, but Finnish verbs do not have a "case" marking independent of these features. For example, the present indicative form minä syön (I eat) and the past form minä söin (I ate) illustrate how verb forms encode person and tense, while the subject nouns carry subject case in nouns, not on the verb.

The concept is better described by standard terms: person and number agreement on finite forms, tense (preesens, imperfekt), mood (indikatiivinen, konditionaali, konjunktiivi), voice (aktiivi vs passiivi), and non-finite forms (infinitiivit, participles, and verbal nouns). If seen in texts, verbitapauksen is typically a nonstandard label or a pedagogical shorthand, not a formal category in Finnish grammar.

See also: Finnish grammar, verb conjugation, tense, mood, voice.