Word
Opiskelijaa kauhistuttaa, ja hänen kätensä vapisevat ennen puheenvuoroa.
Meaning
The student is terrified, and his hands tremble before his turn to speak.
Part of speech
sentence
Pronunciation
Course
Breakdown of Opiskelijaa kauhistuttaa, ja hänen kätensä vapisevat ennen puheenvuoroa.
hän
he / she
ja
and
opiskelija
student
käsi
hand
Questions & Answers about Opiskelijaa kauhistuttaa, ja hänen kätensä vapisevat ennen puheenvuoroa.
Why is the student in the partitive case (opiskelijaa) rather than being the nominative subject (opiskelija)?
This sentence uses the subjectless emotion structure. In Finnish, verbs expressing strong feelings (like terrifying, scaring, or annoying) often take the person feeling the emotion in the partitive case. The verb is then locked into the third-person singular. Instead of saying "The student is terrified", the Finnish structure is closer to "[It] terrifies the student".
If kauhistuttaa is third-person singular, shouldn't there be a subject pronoun like se (it) in front of it?
No, these specific emotion verbs work perfectly well without any grammatical subject. The feeling is treated as something that just happens to the experiencer. If you added se (it), it would mean a specific object or situation is doing the terrifying, rather than expressing the student's general state of terror.
How can we tell that kätensä means plural "hands" and not just singular "hand"?
The verb is the clue! Because vapisevat is in the plural form (they tremble), we know kätensä must be plural. When you attach a possessive suffix like -nsä to a nominative noun, the regular plural marker -t drops out. Because of this rule, kätensä can mean either "his hand" or "his hands", and you have to rely on context or the verb to tell the difference.
Why does puheenvuoro (turn to speak) end with an -a in puheenvuoroa?