There are several types of sentences without a subject. On this page you can find an overview of these types. Please note that many of these sentences without a subject will have a subject when you translate them to English. The lack of subject is often little more than grammatical. This grammatical vs semantical difference of subjects mainly is a topic for Finnish university courses.

Because of that, I want to stress that, for many students, this page will have very little useful information. Take the “minun” in minun täytyy (“I have to”) for example. It’s not technically the subject of the sentence because it’s inflected in the genitive and the verb doesn’t conjugate with the person. However, there is no reason why you can’t consider the minun the subject of the sentence. It’s a purely grammatical thing.

1. Passive Sentences

The most obvious sentence type without a subject is the passive sentence. The passive verb in Finnish typically expresses an action that is done by a person, even if it doesn’t say who. It is used when the do-er of the action (talo rakennetaan – “the house is being built”) either isn’t known (e.g. we don’t know who is building the house) or isn’t important (e.g. we don’t care who is building the house).

2. Feeling Sentences

Feeling verbs like pelottaa, hävettää and kiukuttaa (more here) very often don’t have a subject in them. They generally do have “an experiencer“, but the person experiencing the feeling or sensation is not the subject in these sentences. Minor technicality? Perhaps!

Generally, we can add a subject to these sentences. The subject, then, expresses the cause of the feeling. We know that this is the subject because the verb will be conjugated in agreement with the subject.

3. Sensory Sentences

Verbs related to the senses (e.g. to feel, to sound like) also often don’t have a subject in Finnish. These can be used with an object in a concrete sense (e.g. sade tuntuu märältä ‘the rain feels wet’). In addition, they can be used in more abstract contexts (e.g. tuntuu vaikealta oppia suomea ‘it feels hard to learn Finnish’).

We can add a kind of subject to these sentences (e.g. minusta tuntuu vaikealta oppia suomea ‘ I find it hard to learn Finnish’). While semantically the minusta is the experiencer of the feeling, grammatically we can’t count it as a subject.

4. Weather Sentences

Many of the weather phrases don’t have a subject, because there is no one doing the action. It’s easy to recognise a beginner learning Finnish when you hear incorrect phrases like “Se on pilvistä” (=”it” is cloudy).

5. Necessity Sentences

Verbs expressing necessity appear only in the third person singular. This includes the verbs täytyä and pitää, as well as the constructions minun on pakko and minun on tehtävä. The genitive form in these sentences isn’t a stereotypical subject. Often it will be called a genitiivisubjekti in linguistic sources. Another minor technicality if you’re just trying to learn some basic Finnish.

6. Generic Sentences

Consider the following generic sentences: Museossa ei saa juosta (“In a museum ‘you’ can’t run”). Jos haluaa voittaa, täytyy osallistua (“If ‘you’ want to win, you have to participate). Sängyssä nukkuu paremmin kuin teltassa (“In a bed ‘you’ sleep (one sleeps) better than in a tent”).

As you can see above, the verbs in the sentences above are conjugated in the third person singular (hän haluaa, hän nukkuu). By leaving out the personal pronoun hän we can make the sentence generic. This means that anyone could be the subject of the sentence. In Finnish, we use the term nollapersoona for this phenomenon.

7. “It’s Fun to” Sentences

“On hauskaa” -sentences are pretty common in Finnish. They consist of the verb olla in the third person singular (on), and adjective in its partitive form (hauskaa) and, usually, a verb in its infinitive (uida). For example, the sentence On hauskaa uida means “it’s fun to swim”. There is, however, no “it” in the Finnish sentence – thus making it a sentence without a subject.

For the most common adjectives it is possible to lose the partitive (on hauskaa – on hauska). However, as a learner of Finnish, it can be hard to tell which adjectives can appear in their basic form. As such, it’s easiest to just always use the partitive form.

8. Existential Sentences (torilla on ihmisiä)

Existential sentences tell us what we can find in a place. In Finnish, these sentences start with the word that expresses the location. The end of the sentence specifies who or what is located there. I strongly suggest you read more about this topic in other articles: main article + word order in existential sentences.

Related posts:

Minulla on – Possession (Having Something) – Finnish The Passive Present Participle – TAVA-Participle Present Passive Participle Sentence Constructions The Sinä-Passive and Other Generic Sentences