painottuaverbin

Painottuaverbin is a descriptive term derived from Finnish painottaa ("to emphasize") and verbi ("verb"), literally meaning "the emphasized verb". In linguistics it refers to a verb that, in a particular utterance, carries prosodic or informational focus: the action or its occurrence is highlighted relative to other elements in the sentence. The genitive form painottuaverbin is used when discussing properties or functions of such a verb in analytic contexts.

Emphasis on a verb is a pragmatic and prosodic phenomenon rather than a separate morphological category in Finnish. Finnish typically marks focus and emphasis through prosody (pitch, loudness, length), word order changes, particles, and dedicated focus constructions rather than by altering verb morphology. Therefore a painottuaverbi is identified by its role in discourse — contrast, correction, emphasis, or restriction — rather than by a fixed form.

Study of painottuaverbin concerns how emphasis affects interpretation, information structure, and sentence intonation, and how listeners infer contrastive or confirmatory meanings. Comparable concepts appear in descriptions of other languages (for example, English "emphatic do" or cleft constructions), but realization strategies differ by language. The term is mainly used in descriptive grammars and research on prosody, focus, and Finnish syntax and pragmatics.