Adjectives as attributes of adjectives and adverbs

Genitive forms as qualifiers

The genitive form of an adjective can be used to qualify another adjective or an adverb, e.g. häviävän pieni (extremely small; more literally: vanishingly small), erityisen hyvin (par­tic­u­lar­ly well). In these constructs, the adjective is always in singular, and it typically characterizes the amount of the quantity expressed by the other adjective. Additional examples:

• käsittämättömän vaikea (incomprehensibly difficult)
• mukavan pehmeä (comfortably soft)
• tavallisen ystävällinen (friendly in a usual way); but colloquially tavallisen may mean the opposite of its literal meaning: unusually, very
• kauhean kiva (very nice; literally: terribly nice); colloquial
• kauniin keltainen (beautifully yellow, yellow and beautiful)
• tumman sinipunainen (dark violet); expressions of this type are usually written as compounds, especially when both parts are simple words, e.g. tummansininen (dark blue)

Superlative with a constraint

The genitive of a superlative form (described in the next section) can also be used as a qualifier. Finnish has three ways of expressing e.g. “as large as possible”:

• mahdollisimman suuri, using the genitive of the superlative of mahdollinen (possible); cf. Expressing “as ... as ...”
• suurin mahdollinen (= largest possible), putting the main adjective, here suuri (large), in the superlative and following it with mahdollinen
• niin suuri kuin mahdollista, which has the same structure as the English phrase, except that the word mahdollinen is in the partitive case.

There is no strong stylistic difference between these ways. However, the expression that starts with mahdollisimman might be seen as emphasizing the condition.