# Negatives



## Samuelkristopher

Moi! 

My teacher taught me about negatives recently - she's away at the moment so that's why I've been here a bit lately. I just wanted to clarify, if I've understood correctly:

I read in the grammar book that the objects of a negative sentence are pretty much _always_ in partitive, right? Even if the verb normally requires an object in another case, eg: "Minä pidän tästä kirjasta." BUT "Minä en pidä tätä kirjaa."

Or am I wrong, and after "pitää", it should always be -sta, even in negative? "Minä en pidä tästä kirjasta."

It's just, as an English language teacher, I'm wary of these rules that say, "It's _always_ like this!", because in language it's almost never like that 

Thanks for any replies!!


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## jazyk

No, it's Minä en pidä tästä kirjasta in the eIative because the verb pitää requires that case with the meaning to like. An object would be in the partitive if the affirmative sentence could be in the genitive: Minä avaan oven. - Minä en avaa ovea. In other words, an object in the genitive couldn't appear in negative sentences.


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## Gavril

I agree with Jazyk, except that I think "genitive" is a misleading term to use here. The "-n" ending in this case is simply the accusative, or more exactly, the total-object accusative.


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## jazyk

I used the term genitive because it has the same endings as the genitive morphologically speaking. Semantically it is another matter.


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## Samuelkristopher

Right! That actually makes so much sense, thank you!

P.S., about whether it's genitive or accusative, honestly, I have to disagree with the linguists here and say, as a student, I found it SO much easier to grasp the grammar of objects by cutting accusative out entirely. What we call the specific usage of words is just metalinguistics, just semantics, but I find it a lot simpler to deal with calling 'kirjan' simply the genitive, even if it's what linguists would call some sort of accusative. Russian has the same problem with acBut hey, different things work for different people

Edit: Obviously there are the accusative pronouns, but that's not so difficult to remember!


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## jazyk

I agree with you.


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## Samuelkristopher

I like your name, is that Czech for 'language'? In Russian it's almost the same


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## jazyk

Yes, it is.


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