Using the Genitive

[Rob A.]

I found this sentence:

Tässä luullaan sinun ampuneen karhun.

...which had been parsed this way:

here suppose-Passive you-Genitive shoot-Past Participle-Genitive bear-Genitive
"Here you are believed to have shot a bear."

Now...there is no way I could have figured this sentence out if I had encountered only in Finnish....

My translation would have been something like:

"Here one believes your shot (with a suffix I wouldn't have understood) the bear."

If it had been written:

Tässä luullaan että sinä ammuit karhun.

...I probably would have quickly understood.

I think this is an example of the agent participle usage...??

Sort of like saying ..."Here one believes (it to be) a bear shot by you." ..."Here one believes (that it is) a you-shot-bear... If I assume some understood words, then I can see the agent participle construct and the use of the genitive.... Are there any such "understood" words?

[David O.]

"Here is believed your having shot a bear"? That at least gets a genitive into the English version.

This is a pretty common structure, a way of "condensing" an että clause into something more compact. And you can do it in the present or past, active or passive:

Näin sinun ampuvan karhua. (I saw the shooting as it took place, so present participle).
Näin sinun ampuneen karhun. (I didn't see it as it happened, rather I saw that you had done it, so past participle).
Olettekos muuten nähneet vesimelonia ammuttavan aseella? (present passive participle)
Vesimelonia todettiin ammutun aseella. (past passive participle, "the watermelon was found to have been shot").

[AldenG]

Tuhansien ihmisten pelätään kuolleen/menehtyneen lauantain ja sunnuntain välisenä yönä sattuneessa valtavassa maanjäristyksessä kiinan ja pohjoiskorean rajamailla.

It's almost fun just to make these things up and imagine the guy at STT reading them on the morning radio.

Such sentences seem quirky at first (more so compared to primer Finnish than to everyday Finnish), but learning to read newspapers should actually be considerably easier than learning to read literature. That's because the newspapers use the same few constructions over and over again until the news almost sounds like a parody of itself. In particular the police reports and international disaster news each day can be relied on to use the same small handful of verbs and formulas. At the very least it's good exercise in the common forms the primers tend to neglect until the final chapters.

And it's fun to devise or even make fun of the English translations, but these forms are so basic and simple (in usage, not in grammatical analysis) that it's hardly worth the bother. Just practice a few of the sentences with a few verbs to swap about in -taan and -neen form and you won't even care how to translate them any longer. Nor will you care what the forms are called. I used to know and care, and now it all just seems a distraction.

[Rob A.]

Tuhansien ihmisten pelätään kuolleen/menehtyneen lauantain ja sunnuntain välisenä yönä sattuneessa valtavassa maanjäristyksessä kiinan ja pohjoiskorean rajamailla.

It's almost fun just to make these things up and imagine the guy at STT reading them on the morning radio.

Such sentences seem quirky at first (more so compared to primer Finnish than to everyday Finnish), but learning to read newspapers should actually be considerably easier than learning to read literature. That's because the newspapers use the same few constructions over and over again until the news almost sounds like a parody of itself. In particular the police reports and international disaster news each day can be relied on to use the same small handful of verbs and formulas. At the very least it's good exercise in the common forms the primers tend to neglect until the final chapters.

And it's fun to devise or even make fun of the English translations, but these forms are so basic and simple (in usage, not in grammatical analysis) that it's hardly worth the bother. Just practice a few of the sentences with a few verbs to swap about in -taan and -neen form and you won't even care how to translate them any longer. Nor will you care what the forms are called. I used to know and care, and now it all just seems a distraction.

Well...the first part was easy to understand...right up to the word sattuneessa..the stem of which I can never remember... After that it was a little tougher....a new word for me....maanjäristys="earthquake"... The last part, again, was easy to understand....

So, yes, you are right...once I knew the meaning of maanjäristys.... I knew what it said without using wiktionary or interpreting the grammar...

But it's the "same old; same old"....some "fresh" disaster ...news headlines are all the same: "Thousands feared dead...".... So one's thought processes follow the same pattern...what's the "real" cause this time? ...People living on the side of a volcano...living in a flood zone....not heeding a tsunami warning.... the usual stupidity, no doubt...

Now all my fiddling with grammatical constructions ...All the "back and forth" is slowly getting me to my goal...being able to understand these sentences without having to parse them.... For me this forum is a place I can come to to practice this stuff....mistakes don't matter...nothing turns on them....I can do the "grammatical overkill" here to get my brain cells to line up properly to be able to quickly interpret the Finnish I encounter....

But just for the "fun", lets try to parse the first part of this sentence....

Tuhansien ihmisten pelätään kuolleen/menehtyneen....

The verb here is, pelätään...in Finnish "passive"/"fourth person" form ...with the sense of: "one fears"...so there is an "implied" subject...but no "real" subject . The object is hard for me to discern, without reconstructing the sentence.... If the sentence followed a more "English pattern" it might be:

Pelätään että tuhannet ihminset ovat kuolleet/menehtyneet...

[Aside: I don't think this is quite right, though....we are into the realm of countable and uncountable nouns and whether the "group" is being emphasized or the "individual" within the group....and it's tough to remember how to approach this... ]

I think, though, it is clear that, "Tuhansien ihmisten..." is not the subject of the sentence...there is no actual subject, only an implied one ...rather, "Tuhansien ihmisten", is part of a genitive complement ....and since it is part of a sort of subordinate clause....[along with kuolleen/menehtyneen, all parts need to be in the genitive for consistency...including kuolleen/menehtyneen which are past particplies, acting as...I think... adjectives...

Well...wasn't that "fun"?.... Can someone correct any of this?....

[AldenG]

I don't really know what to say about the subject of the sentence. When we suspend the rules and just talk common sense, tuhansien ihmisten acts as the subject, of course. You have a common-sense subject, verb, and predicate here, even though the way Finnish uses cases makes that a questionable notion in stricter grammatical terms.

The way the sentence works in my mind is reflexively "Thousands of people are feared dead," except that the English no longer occurs to me. (In fact, I think there was a point when I was surprised to realize that such a sentence could be translated almost word-for-word into English, as long as one doesn't insist on capturing the nuances of Finnish cases in the translation.) The cases feel like a relatively minor detail -- minor except that if they were something else, I would hear it either to mean something different or to be jibberish.

I guess what I'm getting at sort of leads back to something I've often said in a different way, though I didn't initially realize I was heading there right now. But to wit: the meaning is not so much in the case itself but in the combination of cases in the entire construct. ____n _____taan ____neen has a meaning and a life of its own that may go beyond the sum of its parts. And I suppose it acquired that meaning for me by reading or hearing it often enough. Fundamentally, we're all must mimicking ma-ma and dä-dä here, aren't we? I mean isn't that the grand theory of language in a nutshell?

In any one construct you may be able to derive or at least justify the meaning as a sum of parts (though not in a deterministic way that it could only have been expressed thus or could only mean such) but there are others where it's not intuitively obvious without knowing how something is actually used.

[David O.]

I would agree with Rob that the sentence is best analyzed as having no subject, but if I had to choose something, I'd say that the subject is Tuhansien ihmisten kuolleen, because what is feared isn't the people, it's their having died. (Note also that the English "thousands of people are feared dead" isn't a normal passive structure, but rather a special construction that foreigners struggle with greatly).

In any one construct you may be able to derive or at least justify the meaning as a sum of parts (though not in a deterministic way that it could only have been expressed thus or could only mean such) but there are others where it's not intuitively obvious without knowing how something is actually used.

Right, there's certainly nothing obvious about this structure. But what I'd add is that ____n _____taan ____neen isn't some sort of structural isolate, it's one (albeit very common) representation of the construction verb + subject(gen) + participle(gen), which is used to replace an että clause (as in my other examples above). There's a broader pattern to be found.

[Jukka Aho]

But just for the "fun", lets try to parse the first part of this sentence.... :evil:

Tuhansien ihmisten pelätään kuolleen/menehtyneen....

The verb here is, pelätään...in Finnish "passive"/"fourth person" form ...with the sense of: "one fears"...so there is an "implied" subject...but no "real" subject . The object is hard for me to discern, without reconstructing the sentence.... If the sentence followed a more "English pattern" it might be:

Pelätään että tuhannet ihminset ovat kuolleet/menehtyneet...

[Aside: I don't think this is quite right, though....we are into the realm of countable and uncountable nouns and whether the "group" is being emphasized or the "individual" within the group....and it's tough to remember how to approach this... :( ]

I think, though, it is clear that, "Tuhansien ihmisten..." is not the subject of the sentence...there is no actual subject, only an implied one ...rather, "Tuhansien ihmisten", is part of a genitive complement ....and since it is part of a sort of subordinate clause....[along with kuolleen/menehtyneen, all parts need to be in the genitive for consistency...including kuolleen/menehtyneen which are past particplies, acting as...I think... adjectives...

Well...wasn't that "fun"?.... Can someone correct any of this?....:D

I’d say it’s simply pelätään functioning as the main verb of the sentence (there’s no subject as it is a “fourth person” or “passive” verb form) and its object, (tuhansien) ihmisten kuolleen, which I guess is a so-called referative structure, or referatiivirakenne in Finnish. (See VISK § 538 and VISK § 471 for more information.)

Your suggestion...

Pelätään, että tuhannet ihmiset ovat kuolleet/menehtyneet...

...is correct if you want to replace that structure with a subordinate clause.

[AldenG]

But what I'd add is that ____n _____taan ____neen isn't some sort of structural isolate, it's one (albeit very common) representation of the construction verb + subject(gen) + participle(gen), which is used to replace an että clause (as in my other examples above). There's a broader pattern to be found.

It's interesting that you point this out. What you say is obviously true, and yet I don't believe I've ever associated this passive construction with the more traditional usages like "Kuulin Jussin kuolleen keuhkokuumeeseen viime vuonna" or "Hannah väittää tulevansa huomenna." In other words, verb + subject(gen) + participle(gen). And I'm curious about whether my failure to associate the first with the latter two (which I DO hear as variations on the same technique), although recognizing and using all of them freely, tells us anything about how acquisition of this language occurs -- or CAN occur -- "in the wild."

My formal linguistic training begins and ends with a single freshman course using a textbook by Chomsky almost thirty years ago. But I think he tells us that while the brain can and does process what he calls "deep structure," including these analytical connections and rearrangements, much of what it does with language is rearranging "surface structure" though learned shortcuts. That would be why so many people are able to do correctly what comparatively few are able to explain correctly.

So when we look at a set of examples like the following:

1. Hänen epäillään kuolleen viime vuonna. He is suspected to have died last year.
2. Häntä epäillään murhaajaksi. He is suspected of being the/a murderer.
3. Hänen epäillään murhanneen naisen . He is suspected to have murdered the woman.
4. Häntä epäillään naisen murhasta. He is suspected of the woman's murder.

5. Hänen epäillään äänestäneen laittomasti. He is suspected of having voted illegally.
6. Häntä epäillään ulkomaalaisena aina ensin/ensimmäiseksi. As a foreigner, he is always the first to be suspected.

...it sometimes feels to me that they have more in common than Miehen epäillään kuolleen viime vuonna has with Kuulin Jukan tulevan huomenna. According to my version of the surface-structure hypothesis, structure 1 becomes structure 2 by harmonizing häntä to murhaajaksi. And even moreso as #2 becomes #3.

It feels to me like this is what I do by reflex. I think the snippets percolate up with the pieces more or less in order and I trim the endings -- rather than converting Ihmiset epäilevät, että mies kuoli viime vuonna through the steps of (1) putting it into passive, (2) changing "[comma] että mies kuoli" into "miehen kuolleen", and finally (3) moving miehen to the start of the snippet.

For a moment here I struggled with the following:

Hänen epäillään äänestäneen laittomasti ulkomaalaisena viime vuoden vaaleissa. He is suspected of having voted illegally as a foreigner in last year's elections.

I wanted to begin with häntä epäillään ulkomaalaisena... and say that because he was a foreigner, he was suspected of voting illegally in last year's elections.

It fell apart at the point of häntä . . . äänestäneen and I realized that I can't use that structure in a simple way to say that the suspicion arises because he is a foreigner -- it was trying too hard to combine häntä epäillään ulkomaalaisena and hänen epäillään äänestäneen into one compact structure. It was like trying to chop two different sentences in half and graft them together in the middle with duct tape. Understandable but wobbly and just not quite right. I suppose the native ear would ask something like, "Hey, wait a sec -- where did äänestäneen come from all of a sudden?"

I think maybe putting ulkomaalaisena at the beginning makes it sound more like he is suspected because he's a foreigner.

Ulkomaalaisena hänen epäillään äänestäneen laittomasti viime vuoden vaaleissa.

Or is there still a grammatical hiccup between ulkomaalaisena and hänen, I'm not sure.

[David O.]

Well, I think it all depends on how one learns the language. You seem to have learned more through immersion, and therefore the structures that you lump together in your mind are ones that sound similar to each other (mainly because the word order is the same, as in all your hänen/häntä epäillään... examples); I've learned 99% through reading and poring through grammar books, so how it sounds is secondary to the underlying pseudo-mathematical structure of the sentence. For me, whether it's active or passive/impersonal, the fundamental structure is the same.

My brain goes straight to the Hänen epäillään kuolleen pattern now (like you said, the pieces come to mind in the right order and I just have to make all the endings match), I don't have to start with the että clause and convert it... but I certainly used to do it that way. It took a while to get to the point of doing it reflexively.

Ulkomaalaisena hänen epäillään äänestäneen laittomasti viime vuoden vaaleissa.

Hmm. I could be wrong here, but when you put ulkomaalaisena at the beginning like that, I want it to refer to the subject rather than the object (this is clear when you make the sentence active: Ulkomaalaisena luulen hänen äänestäneen laittomasti. Rather nonsensical, perhaps, but it's unambiguous with regard to who the ulkomaalainen is), which would make it impossible in an impersonal sentence.

[Jukka Aho]

Ulkomaalaisena hänen epäillään äänestäneen laittomasti viime vuoden vaaleissa.

Hmm. I could be wrong here, but when you put ulkomaalaisena at the beginning like that, I want it to refer to the subject rather than the object (this is clear when you make the sentence active: Ulkomaalaisena luulen hänen äänestäneen laittomasti. Rather nonsensical, perhaps, but it's unambiguous with regard to who the ulkomaalainen is), which would make it impossible in an impersonal sentence.

I don’t see that being a problem as such. As Alden already suspected, the main problem what that sentence boils down to this:

I think maybe putting ulkomaalaisena at the beginning makes it sound more like he is suspected because he's a foreigner.

Here’s an example of similar usage where the -na word (the word in the essive) more clearly functions as a “reasoning” for what will be suggested thereafter:

“Elopilla itsellään on valtavat paineet, koska amerikkalaisena hänen odotetaan valloittavan Yhdysvallat takaisin merkittäväksi markkina-alueeksi Nokialle.” (“...because as an American, he is expected to...”)

(Well, actually he’s Canadian but from a distance it all blurs together...)

[j.petsku]

I don’t see that being a problem as such. As Alden already suspected, the main problem what that sentence boils down to this:

AldenG wrote:
I think maybe putting ulkomaalaisena at the beginning makes it sound more like he is suspected because he's a foreigner.

Yes, but this confused me whether or not ulkomaalaisena was at the beginning or later on. Can it be read as ambiguous in both versions? The two words laittomasti and ulkomaalaisena seem to be sort of floating about independently, though they are intended to be connected semantically. Perhaps replacing the two words with a more cohesive grammatical structure...
ilman laillista kansalaisuutta
...would eliminate the ambiguity?

I have a question concerning the word order of these structures. Rob's original quote was:
Tässä luullaan sinun ampuneen karhun.
(Luullaan sinun ampuneen...)

But most of the other examples have a different word order:
Hänen epäillään äänestäneen...

Do either of these sound more natural or more common?

[Rob A.]

....So when we look at a set of examples like the following:

1. Hänen epäillään kuolleen viime vuonna. He is suspected to have died last year.
2. Häntä epäillään murhaajaksi. He is suspected of being the/a murderer.
3. Hänen epäillään murhanneen naisen . He is suspected to have murdered the woman.
4. Häntä epäillään naisen murhasta. He is suspected of the woman's murder.

5. Hänen epäillään äänestäneen laittomasti. He is suspected of having voted illegally.
6. Häntä epäillään ulkomaalaisena aina ensin/ensimmäiseksi. As a foreigner, he is always the first to be suspected.

...it sometimes feels to me that they have more in common than Miehen epäillään kuolleen viime vuonna has with Kuulin Jukan tulevan huomenna. According to my version of the surface-structure hypothesis, structure 1 becomes structure 2 by harmonizing häntä to murhaajaksi. And eve moreso as #2 becomes #3.

It feels to me like this is what I do by reflex. I think the snippets percolate up with the pieces more or less in order and I trim the endings -- rather than converting Ihmiset epäilevät, että mies kuoli viime vuonna through the steps of (1) putting it into passive, (2) changing "[comma] että mies kuoli" into "miehen kuolleen", and finally (3) moving miehen to the start of the snippet.

Good examples.... At the risk of over-reaching my knowledge level, I would try to look at this in terms of the "interplay" of the four structure type cases....nominative, genitive, accusative, and partitive. The accusative is actually the toughest case to properly comprehend....and grammarians are not at all "settled" about this case. It seems that the "accusative" can be viewed as another use of the genitive case....and is used when the grammatical sense being conveyed is one of "results" or "completeness"...or some similar terminology that is "opposite" to what the partitive case is intended to convey.

There is the confounding situation, though, that when pronouns come into play there is now something that is clearly a separately marked "accusative" case.... and, interestingly, the plural "t" marker is used... What this signifies is a bit beyond my grasp at the moment, though pronouns in all languages tend to be very conservative grammatical elements....[about all that is left of the case system in English is the declension of pronouns]. I think I can leave this here....a way of looking at the grammar in order to make sense of the particular "communication".

And I think it is useful to continually remind oneself that the language came first and that grammatical analysis is an attempt to understand this "communication" process. The tools of grammatical analysis should not be viewed as the "sacred" element in all of this...rather the language should be.... To the extent that some aspects of Finnish are difficult to analyze with these tools...eg. the Finnish "passive"...the "imperative"...genitive complements ...merely reminds one that the original tools of grammatical analysis had been developed for other languages...specifically for Latin and Greek....and that, if anything, additional "tools" may need to be added when analyzing other languages...in this instance, Finnish.

With your first example...

1. Hänen epäillään kuolleen viime vuonna. He is suspected to have died last year.

...I think it is clear that the words, Hänen...kuolleen viime vuonna, are the direct object of this "fourth person" sentence.... a genitive complement...[I think... ] ....Here the pronoun is the subject...[of the genitive complement or "clause, that is] ...and since it is in the genitive, all other elements of the "clause" must align.....

Your second sentence is a different "animal"...

2. Häntä epäillään murhaajaksi. He is suspected of being the/a murderer.

....Häntä....is clearly the direct object of this sentence...and is in the partitive case because the "suspicion" of "him" is ongoing...incomplete... While, murhaajaksi, is simply the indirect object of the sentence. Had the situation called for an "accusative" direct object, then the pronoun would have been, hänet....and had it been a noun...I think because of the "passive" verb, it would have been an "endingless accusative"....or the nominative form....eg... Jukka...not Jukan ....and this, because we do not have a subject when dealing with a "passive" verb.... It seems "efficiency" in communication is served by allowing the use of a nominative form where an "accusative"/"genitive" form might be called for if there were a "full" subject....

The next four examples are variations on the same theme:

3. Hänen epäillään murhanneen naisen . He is suspected to have murdered the woman.
4. Häntä epäillään naisen murhasta. He is suspected of the woman's murder.
5. Hänen epäillään äänestäneen laittomasti. He is suspected of having voted illegally.
6. Häntä epäillään ulkomaalaisena aina ensin/ensimmäiseksi. As a foreigner, he is always the first to be suspected.

....I don't think the element...ulkomaalaisena...an indrect object...changes anything...the "suspicion" is on-going...therefore the "partitive" must be used or "mis-communciation" will result....

I think I'll leave it here for now...and collect my thoughts.... It is complex stuff ....

[AldenG]

So Rob, I'm curious how you would parse "John is feared" and "John is feared lost" in English. Do you do it any differently from the way you would in Finnish?

[AldenG]

Here’s an example of similar usage where the -na word (the word in the essive) more clearly functions as a “reasoning” for what will be suggested thereafter:

“Elopilla itsellään on valtavat paineet, koska amerikkalaisena hänen odotetaan valloittavan Yhdysvallat takaisin merkittäväksi markkina-alueeksi Nokialle.” (“...because as an American, he is expected to...”)

(Well, actually he’s Canadian but from a distance it all blurs together...)

So that's legit, then.

I wasn't sure whether there was discord between the amerikkalaisena/ulkomaalaisena and the strict subject of the sentence, as in this very typical (but incorrect) example from a recent Oregon Coast: "As a young boy during World War II, the Oregon coast seemed as remote as the far side of the moon; a place of 'trees, seas, and ocean breeze...' and perhaps 'cheese,' if you were headed for Tillamook." You know what it means, but it's a bit like a window frame where one corner doesn't meet.

To me, "He" is the subject in "As an American, he is expected...", just as it would be in "He is rich." These discussions go back and forth so much that I sometimes get lost, but is hänen not regarded as a genitive subject in hänen odotetaan valloittavan...? To me the point of the passive is that the verb form in isolation doesn't have a subject (or more properly, the subject is impersonal or universal), but that doesn't mean the sentence doesn't have a subject. I think it would be awfully ironic to cast hänen as an object in Finnish to compel conformity with Latinate analysis if actual Latinate languages treat it as a subject in their version of the construction.

[Rob A.]

So Rob, I'm curious how you would parse "John is feared" and "John is feared lost" in English. Do you do it any differently from the way you would in Finnish?

Interesting...though the first cavaet is that Finnish does not have a "passive voice" that is comparable to the English passive... I would not parse it the same way.... In this sentence..."John is feared.", "John" would be the subject of the sentence, because the nature of the passive sentence in English is such that the subject of the sentence receives the "action"... And, in this instance, the "agent" has not been mentioned.

The second sentence, "John is feared lost"...is pretty much the same with an additional element, an indirect object...which would be understood as, "(to be) lost."....and again the "agent" is not mentioned.

But parsing English passive sentences can get tricky, too....

So the short answer is that the English passive and the so-called Finnish "passive" are not really comparable.... I actually prefer the label..."fourth-person"...though I suppose it has its shortcomings as well...