kävelevän

kävelevän is the genitive singular form of the Finnish present active participle kävelevä, which means walking. In Finnish, participles can function both as adjectives and as parts of noun phrases, agreeing with the noun they describe in case and number. The meaning of kävelevä is ongoing action or characteristic, as in someone who is currently walking.

Used attributively, kävelevä behaves like an ordinary adjective. The base form kävelevä precedes a noun: kävelevä lapsi means “the walking child.” When the head noun is in genitive, the participle takes the corresponding genitive ending: kävelevän lapsen vanhemmat means “the walking child’s parents.” The participle also inflects for number and case in forms such as kävelevien koirien omistajat, meaning “the owners of the walking dogs.” In plural nominative, you would use kävelevät koirat to say “the walking dogs” as a simple noun phrase with plural subject.

Formation and related forms: kävelevä is formed from the verb kävellä (to walk) with the present active participle suffix -vä. The genitive singular is kävelevän, the genitive plural is kävelevien, and other case forms follow the usual Finnish participle declension rules. The participle agrees with the head noun in case and number, while gender is not a factor in Finnish.

In usage, kävelevä and its inflections are common in descriptive writing and everyday speech to describe someone or something that is currently walking or characterized by walking. It can function in a variety of syntactic positions, from simple noun phrases to embedded descriptors within longer clauses.