The Finnish partitive case: insights from L2 acquisition

Abstract

The paper focuses on the partitive case in L2 Finnish. The partitive has developed from a separative or ablative case (Aikio, 2022) into a structural case (Kiparsky 1998, a.o.) and in modern Finnish it has always been considered as one of the hardest aspects to be acquired by non-native speakers (Denison 1957, Heinämäki 1994, Huumo 2005, 2010, 2020). The difficulties with the partitive in second and foreign language acquisition are generally assumed to be due to the many functions that the partitive case can have. With reference to object, the partitive is related to: quantity, negation and unboundedness of the event. In order to answer the question whether learners of Finnish make a distinction between the different circumstances under which the object partitive is required, an online task was created. The results show a clear hierarchy of the partitive contexts: negation was the context with less variability whereas aspect was the one with more difficulties for L2ers.