edellisenä

Edellisenä is the essive singular form of the Finnish adjective edellinen, meaning "previous" or "former." In Finnish, adjectives agree with the nouns they modify and take different case endings. The essive form edellisenä is used to express "as the previous [one]" or to indicate a temporal frame in certain time expressions, such as "on the previous day" or "as the previous paragraph."

Usage of edellisenä is most common in written and formal Finnish, including news reports, academic writing, and legal or descriptive prose. It appears with a following noun in the essive case (often in combinations like edellisenä päivänä or edellisenä iltana), where the whole phrase denotes a temporal reference or a role/state of the referenced item. The form is generally seen when describing something in relation to what preceded it, rather than simply naming the item as the last in a sequence.

Relationship to other forms: edellinen is the base meaning "previous." The related word viimeinen typically means "the last" in a sense of the final item in a sequence, while edellinen refers to the immediately preceding one. The edellisenä form is specifically the essive case used to convey "as the previous X" or to set a temporal frame in phrases.

Examples:

- Edellisenä päivänä järjestettiin tilaisuus. (An event was held on the previous day.)

- Hän puhui edellisenä iltana. (He spoke on the previous evening.)

- Edellisenä kappaleena esitetään seuraava kohta. (The previous paragraph is presented as the preceding section.)

Edellisenä thus functions as a grammatical tool to reference what came before in time or order, within the Finnish essive construction.