taivutumana

Taivutumana is a Finnish linguistic term that refers to a word in an inflected form. It is used to describe the state of a word when its form bears grammatical markings such as person, number, tense, mood, or case, as opposed to its base or dictionary form (perusmuoto). The noun taivutuma means an inflectional form, and the suffix -na in taivutumana signals a state or condition, yielding the sense of “in the inflected form.”

In linguistic descriptions, taivutumana is a practical label for discussing a word form without naming the exact form. It appears in grammar handbooks, corpora annotations, and comparative discussions of morphologies. When annotating data or explaining how a verb or noun changes, one might refer to a specific taivutumana muoto, such as a verb form like puh- un or puh- en, to illustrate the idea of inflection rather than the lemma.

Examples of taivutumana muotoja include common verb forms such as puhun, puhut, or puhuu, which show person and number, as well as noun forms that indicate case or number. The exact form depends on the word class and the language’s inflection rules. Taivutumana is thus a useful umbrella term for all inflected variants of a word.

See also taivutus (inflection), taivutusmuoto (inflectional form), and conjugation.