Questions & Answers about Nainen vihaa savua pihallaan.
Why isn't the pronoun hänen used before pihallaan?
Because the yard belongs to the subject of the sentence (the woman). In Finnish, when a third-person subject owns the location or object in the same clause (meaning 'her own yard'), you must drop the genitive pronoun hänen and only use the possessive suffix (-an). If you said hänen pihallaan, it would mean the smoke is in some other woman's yard!
Could I write pihallansa instead of pihallaan?
Yes! The third-person possessive suffix has two variants: -nsa/-nsä or a lengthened final vowel + -n. Both pihallaan and pihallansa are grammatically correct and mean 'in her yard'. However, the vowel-lengthening version (pihallaan) is much more common and natural in modern Finnish.
Why is savu (smoke) in the partitive case (savua) here?
Why does piha take the adessive ending -lla ('on') rather than the inessive -ssa ('in')?
While English says 'in the yard', Finnish treats open, outdoor areas like a yard (piha), a market square (tori), or a street (katu) as surfaces. Therefore, they usually take outer local cases like the adessive (-lla), meaning you are literally 'on' the yard.
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