Breakdown of Ovatko sinun kasvattamasi tomaatit niin maukkaita?
olla
to be
sinä
you
tomaatti
tomato
niin
so
maukas
tasty
kasvattaa
to grow (something)
Questions & Answers about Ovatko sinun kasvattamasi tomaatit niin maukkaita?
How is the agent participle used to say "grown by you" in this sentence?
We use the verb kasvattaa (to grow). We take the strong stem kasvatta- and add the agent participle ending -ma. To show who did the action, we use the genitive pronoun sinun (your) and attach the matching possessive suffix -si to the participle, creating sinun kasvattamasi.
Since tomaatit is plural, shouldn't kasvattamasi have a plural marker too?
It actually does, but it is hidden! Normally, a word modifying a nominative plural noun gets a -t ending. However, in Finnish, when you add a possessive suffix like -si to a word ending in a plural -t, the -t disappears entirely. So kasvattamat + -si simply becomes kasvattamasi.
Do I have to include the word sinun here, or could I just say kasvattamasi tomaatit?
You can leave sinun out! Just like with standard possession, first and second-person pronouns (minun, sinun, meidän, teidän) can be dropped because the possessive suffix (-si) already tells us who did the action. Including sinun here just adds a little extra emphasis to the fact that you grew them.
Why is maukkaita in the partitive plural instead of the nominative plural?
Maukkaita is a predicative adjective (an adjective that comes after the verb "to be" to describe the subject). Because the subject of the sentence is a plural countable noun (tomaatit), the adjective describing it must be in the partitive plural.
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