Breakdown of He haluavat laajentaa autotalliaan.
he
they
haluta
to want
autotalli
garage
laajentaa
to expand (transitive)
Questions & Answers about He haluavat laajentaa autotalliaan.
Why is there no heidän before autotalliaan?
In Finnish, when the third-person owner is the same as the subject of the sentence (here, he), you must drop the genitive pronoun (hänen or heidän) and only use the possessive suffix on the noun. If you explicitly added heidän here, it would mean they want to expand someone else's garage.
Why is the word for garage in the partitive case (autotallia) before the possessive suffix is added?
The verb laajentaa (to expand) generally takes a partitive object because the action is viewed as a continuous process or a change in degree, rather than a discrete, completed whole. So autotalli becomes autotallia, and then the possessive suffix is attached.
The third-person possessive suffix is often -nsa or -nsä. Why is it -an in autotalliaan?
The third-person possessive suffix has two forms: -nsa/-nsä and -Vn (where V is a copy of the preceding vowel). When the inflected word ends in a short vowel, like the partitive autotallia, it is much more common and natural to use the -Vn form, making it autotalliaan. Both autotalliaan and autotalliansa are grammatically correct, but the first is overwhelmingly preferred in standard Finnish.
Does the coreference rule still apply even though autotalliaan is the object of the infinitive laajentaa, not the main verb haluavat?
Yes. The reflexive ownership rule traces back to the subject of the entire clause. Since he (they) are the ones doing the wanting and the expanding, the garage belongs to the main subject, meaning the omission of heidän works exactly the same way here.
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