Breakdown of Lasinpuhalluksenko jälkeen he jäähdyttävät sen heti?
se
it / he / she (of a person) / that
he
they
heti
immediately
jälkeen
after
jäähdyttää
to cool down (something)
lasinpuhallus
glassblowing
Questions & Answers about Lasinpuhalluksenko jälkeen he jäähdyttävät sen heti?
Why is the question clitic -ko attached to lasinpuhalluksen rather than the verb?
This is the core of contrastive focus fronting! By pulling lasinpuhalluksen to the front of the sentence and adding -ko, the speaker is specifically verifying the timing: "Is it after the glassblowing (and not some other step) that they cool it?" Normally, yes/no questions start with the verb, but here the true focus of the question is the glassblowing.
Could the -ko clitic be attached to the postposition jälkeen instead?
Yes, you could absolutely say Lasinpuhalluksen jälkeenkö he jäähdyttävät sen heti? Both are correct. Attaching -ko to the noun (lasinpuhalluksenko) hyper-focuses on the glassblowing itself, whereas attaching it to the postposition focuses on the whole phrase "after the glassblowing".
The verb is jäähdyttävät. How does this differ from the similar verb jäähtyä?
This is a great example of Finnish transitive vs. intransitive verb pairs. Jäähdyttää is transitive, meaning someone does it to something else ("to cool something down"), which is why we have the object sen (it). Jäähtyä is intransitive and means something cools down on its own, for example: Lasi jäähtyy (The glass cools down).
Why is the object sen in the genitive-looking accusative case instead of the partitive?
The action of cooling the object down is viewed here as a complete, definitive action rather than an ongoing, incomplete process. Therefore, it requires a total object. For the pronoun se (it), the total object form is sen.
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