edeltävä

Edeltävää is a Finnish adjective form that expresses the idea of something being preceding or previous. It is the partitive singular form used with nouns in partitive to refer to the preceding or prior item, period, or context. The base adjective edeltävä comes from the verb edeltää, meaning “to precede” or “to come before.” In usage, edeltävää typically appears in phrases that denote attributes or data related to something earlier, such as time periods, events, or quantities.

Grammatical notes: Edeltävä is declined like an ordinary Finnish adjective. In singular, the partitive form is edeltävää; other singular forms include nominative edeltävä, genitive edeltävän, inessive edeltävässä, and elative edeltävästä. In plural, the nominative is edeltävät, and the partitive is edeltäviä. When edeltävä modifies a noun in partitive, the phrase often functions as a dependent modifier in clauses about earlier matters, such as statistics, events, or conditions from the past.

Typical usage patterns include:

- edeltävää vuotta koskevat tiedot (data concerning the preceding year)

- edeltävää tapahtumaa koskevat lausunnot (statements concerning the preceding event)

These constructions illustrate how edeltävää carries the sense of “pertaining to what came before,” without asserting the concrete identity of the object beyond its temporal relation.

See also terms for temporal ordering and Finnish comparative terminology, such as edellinen and aiempi, which convey related notions of prior sequence but differ in nuance and syntactic behavior.