tukimuotoja

Tukimuotoja is the plural form of tukimuoto, a Finnish linguistic term used to describe a set of supporting or auxiliary word forms that accompany a base word to convey additional grammatical or semantic information. The concept appears mainly in linguistic descriptions and language teaching as a way to discuss how a word’s form can be extended beyond its core lexeme.

The term tukimuoto derives from tukia, meaning support, and muoto, meaning form. In descriptions of Finnish grammar and morphology, tukimuotoja are treated as forms that accompany the main form of a word and provide features such as case, number, tense, mood, definiteness, or aspect. The exact scope of what counts as a tukimuoto can vary among theoretical approaches, but the common idea is that these forms help express information that is not carried by the stem alone.

In practice, tukimuotoja may include various types of inflectional and derivational endings, affixes, clitics, or other morpho-syntactic markers that attach to the stem. They are discussed to explain how sentences convey time, modality, reference, and other grammatical relations without requiring separate lexical items every time.

Related concepts include the singular tukimuoto, taivutus (inflection), affixes and morphemes. Tukimuotoja is a specialized term used primarily by scholars and students working with Finnish grammar and morphology.