Finnish: An Essential Grammar THIRD EDITION

This thoroughly revised third edition of Finnish: An Essential Grammar is grounded in fundamental insights of modern linguistics and incorporates some of the latest achievements in the description of written and spoken Finnish. It gives a systematic account of the structures of the written language and offers increased attention to the key characteristics of present-day colloquial Finnish. No prior knowledge is assumed on the part of the reader and grammatical rules are clearly explained without jargon. Features of this new editioninclude: • pronunciation guide, including the tendencies in present-day colloquial Finnish • thorough descriptions of morphology (word structure) and syntax (sentence structure) • clear rules and an abundance of concrete examples, from both written and colloquial Finnish • updated vocabulary in the examples • an effective new scheme for detecting the morphological structure of any word form • subject index. This is the ideal reference source both for those studying Finnish independently and for students in schools, colleges, universities and adult classes of all types.

Preface. Abbreviations. 1. Introduction 2. Pronunciation and sound structure 3. Word structure 4. Two important sound alternations 5. The declension of nominals 6. The conjugation of verbs 7. Sentence structure 8. The nominative case and the partitive case 9. The genitive case, total objects and possessive suffixes 10. The six local cases 11. Other cases 12. Numbers and numerals 13. Pronouns 14. Tenses 15. Moods 16. The passive 17. Infinitives 18. Participles 19. Comparison of adjectives 20. Other word classes and clitics 21. Word formation 22. The colloquial spoken language Appendix 1. Appendix 2.

Fred Karlsson is Professor Emeritus of General Linguistics at the University of Helsinki.