grammatilliset

Grammatilliset is a Finnish-language term used in linguistics to refer to grammatical features and categories that encode information about how words relate to one another in sentences. The concept covers morphology and syntax that express tense, aspect, mood, number, case, person, definiteness, agreement, voice, and evidentiality, among others. Grammatical information is typically conveyed through inflection, affixes, clitics, or auxiliary words, as opposed to lexical meaning carried by content words.

In linguistic descriptions, grammatilliset categories are analyzed as part of a language’s morphosyntax. Languages vary widely in how much they mark grammatically; some are highly inflected (fusional or agglutinative), while others are predominantly analytic with limited morphology. The concept helps scholars discuss how languages encode relationships between words, such as subject–predicate agreement, case marking of nouns, or tense marking on verbs.

Finnish, as an example, illustrates extensive grammatical marking. Nouns decline for number and multiple cases; adjectives agree with nouns in number and case; verbs conjugate for person and number and encode tense, mood, and aspect. Grammatilliset phenomena also intersect with function words and word order, since some grammatical relations are signaled syntactically rather than morphologically.

See also: grammar, morphology, syntax, grammatical category, language typology. Etymology: Grammatilliset derives from the Finnish word grammatillinen “grammatical,” formed from the broader concept of gram-matical knowledge through Finnish derivational suffixes.