On the Usage of the Finnish Elative and Partitive
as Nominal Modifier

In this study we examined the usage of the elative and partitive cases as post-nominal modifier, focusing on the noun osa (“part”) co-occurring with these modifiers. We collected the data from the corpus of a Finnish magazine. The main concern of the analysis was the correlation between the selection of case and the syntactic environment in which osa appears.

As a case study our analysis examined the following four major syntactic environment:

1. osa is the subject of a clause.
2. osa is the object of a transitive clause.
3. osa is the object of a passive clause.
4. osa is the predicative of a copula clause.

The study revealed several important relationships between the environment of osa and the case of its modifier. The most interesting contrast was seen between (1-3) and (4). In the former the majority of the modifiers appeared in elative, and in the latter over 90% of the modifier occurred in partitive. We interpreted this contrast as resulting from the difference of definiteness, referring to the fact that in the forth environment the predicative noun is usually indefinite.