inessivpluralis

Inessivpluralis is the plural form of the inessive case, a grammatical category used to express location inside something. The inessive answers the question where something is located, roughly corresponding to the English “in” or “inside,” and its plural form marks location within multiple objects or places.

In Finnish, a well-documented example of an inessive system, the inessive has two basic suffixal forms. The singular is -ssa or -ssä, and the plural is -issa or -issä. The exact variant is determined by vowel harmony and the phonology of the stem. Examples include talo (house) with the singular talossa (in the house) and the plural taloissa (in the houses); kirja (book) with kirjassa (in the book) and kirjoissa (in the books). Some stems may undergo minor phonological adjustments, but the general pattern remains stable.

The concept of inessivpluralis is primarily of interest in descriptive Finnic linguistics and typology. It is used to describe how languages with rich case systems encode location within multiple referents, and it is contrasted with the singular inessive or with other locative cases such as the elative or adessive.

Etymology: The term combines inessive, the locative case meaning “in,” with pluralis, the Latin-derived word for plural, to denote the pluralized locative form.

Overall, inessivpluralis illustrates how languages with case systems express plural spatial relations and how vowel harmony interacts with suffixal pluralization in Finnish.