verbikielessä

Verbikielessä is a descriptive term used in Finnish linguistics to refer to a hypothetical or analytic perspective in which the verbal system functions as the primary core of grammar, shaping clause structure, argument realization, and information packaging. The expression is not the name of a well-defined language family, but a framework for analyzing languages or subparts of languages where verbs carry extensive morphosyntactic information and where nominal parts of the sentence play a comparatively secondary role.

Core idea: in a verbikielessä, the verb may encode tense, aspect, mood, voice, agreement with subject and object, valency changes, and sometimes incorporate nouns into the verb complex. Predication tends to be predicate-centered, with syntactic relations often realized via verbal affixes or through verb serialization rather than through explicit noun phrases. Nouns, adjectives, and demonstratives may be reduced in syntactic weight, or appear as light dependents with limited inflection.

Typological context: the notion relates to broader discussions of predicate- or verb-centered syntax and to debates about verb-framed versus satellite-framed languages. It is a descriptive tool used mainly in Finnish-language scholarship to compare how different languages allocate semantic load between verbs and nouns, rather than a formal classification.

Usage: scholars may invoke verbikielessä when analyzing languages with rich verbal morphology, extensive derived verb forms, or prolific incorporation. It is also used pedagogically to illustrate how different grammatical architectures affect information flow and sentence processing.

See also: verb-framed languages, valency, incorporation, predicate-argument structure, morphosyntax.