Yleistävät

Yleistävät is a Finnish verb form meaning “they generalize.” It is the third-person plural present indicative form of the verb yleistää, which means to generalize or to apply a general rule to a broader set of cases. In ordinary use, yleistävät refers to people or entities performing the act of generalizing.

The verb yleistää is derived from the adjective yleinen, meaning general or common, with a standard Finnish verb-forming suffix. The present tense marker for third-person plural is -vat or -vät, which yields yleistävät. Like other Finnish verbs, yleistää takes a subject in the nominative, and its object, when present, appears in the appropriate case depending on the verb’s meaning and the sentence structure.

In usage, yleistäminen (the noun form) is the act or process of generalizing. The term yleistävät can describe statements, claims, or analyses that extend observations from a subset to a larger group. Depending on context, yleistäminen can be neutral or carry a critical connotation if the generalization is viewed as inaccurate or overbroad. A common discussion in rhetoric and logic concerns overgeneralization, a fallacy where conclusions about a whole group are drawn from too small or unrepresentative evidence.

See also yleistäminen, the noun for generalization, and discussions of generalization in logic and empirical research.