Breakdown of Hän lienee analysoinut aineiston mahdollisimman tarkasti.
olla
to be
hän
he / she
tarkasti
carefully (closely, attentively)
mahdollisimman
as ... as possible
Questions & Answers about Hän lienee analysoinut aineiston mahdollisimman tarkasti.
Why do we use lienee analysoinut instead of just saying on varmaan analysoinut?
Lienee analysoinut is the perfect tense of the potential mood, which expresses that something probably happened. Lienee is the potential form of the auxiliary verb olla. While on varmaan analysoinut is perfectly fine and much more common in everyday speech, the potential mood is widely used in formal or written Finnish to express probability compactly.
Why does the object aineiston end in -n here?
The action is viewed as completed, meaning the person has analyzed the entire material. Therefore, the object takes the total object case (the accusative that looks like the genitive). The fact that the sentence expresses a probability rather than a certainty does not change this object rule.
How does the construction mahdollisimman tarkasti work?
Mahdollisimman is the genitive form of mahdollisin (the most possible). In Finnish, placing mahdollisimman immediately before an adjective or adverb creates the meaning "as [word] as possible". Here, it modifies the adverb tarkasti (carefully).
How is the adverb tarkasti formed?