Non-finite Verbs and their Objects in Finnic

aet.lees iinet.net.au Abstract. This paper presents a corpus study comparing and contrast-ing the infinitives and participles and their objects in the Finnic lan-guages Estonian, Finnish, Karelian, Livonian and Veps. There are up to four infinitives, the nomenclature varying from language to lan-guage, but here referred to as-ta,-ma,-e and fourth infinitive. The-ma infinitive is inflected for a number of cases, the others have fewer cases. The-ta infinitives function as subjects and objects, while the-ma infinitives have an adverbial function. The-e infinitive links two simultaneous activities. The fourth infinitive is productive only for expressions of obligation in Livonian. Active and passive present and past participles occur in all the languages. The present participles function mainly as adjectives and agree in number and case with the noun which they modify. In Finnish passive present participles can be used to indicate obligation. Past participles form compound tenses with the auxiliary ‘be’, and can also head participial clauses. They also function as adjectives, but only show agreement in some lan-guages. The objects of non-finite verbs are more frequently partitive than those of finite verbs, because the action is usually incomplete