A3 Refereed book chapter or chapter in a compilation book
Agenttipartisiippi – suomen kielen passiivimaisin passiivi?
Authors: Hynönen Emmi, Kittilä Seppo
Editors: Leena Maria Heikkola, Geda Paulsen, Katarzyna Wojciechowicz, Jutta Rosenberg
Publishing place: Åbo
Publication year: 2021
Book title : Språkets funktion Juhlakirja Urpo Nikanteen 60-vuotispäivän kunniaksi Festskrift till Urpo Nikanne på 60-årsdagen Festschrift for Urpo Nikanne in honor of his 60th birthday
First page : 69
Last page: 82
Number of pages: 13
ISBN: 978-952-12-4061-4
eISBN: 978-952-12-4062-1
Web address : https://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-952-12-4062-1
The essence of the Finnish passive has been a popular topic for decades, and the existence of
the category has even been questioned. The structures that the Finnish grammars call passives, seem to
differ structurally from their counterparts in, for example, the most spoken languages in Europe. In this
study, we focus on one of the Finnish passive-like constructions, i.e., the agent participle construction
(APC). Our hypothesis is that in some respects this construction can be defined as the most passive-like
or prototypical passive of Finnish. We study APC in light of proposed passive prototypes defined for
cross-linguistic comparison. We also compare the APC to the so-called Finnish basic passive for
determining which of these can be considered more prototypical. The study shows that in some respects
the APC better corresponds to the description of the prototypical passive than the basic passive
construction, and that both studied constructions can be defined as more prototypical, which depends
largely on which feature of passive is taken to be more decisive.