The aggressive (Finnish: aggressiivi) is a verb construction that occurs in the Finnish language, especially in emotional outbursts. It expresses negation or rejection and resembles a negative clause, but it lacks the Finnish negative auxiliary. Instead, the aggressive is often marked with an obscene word, which tends to be seen as a distinctive feature of the construction. The aggressive has playfully been described as a grammatical mood by the inventor of the term, but the construction operates on the syntactical level and morphologically the verb is in a regular mood (typically in the indicative). It is only found in the vernacular, with the written examples almost always being an example of code-switching.
The aggressive is in vogue particularly with the youth, but the characteristic omission of the negative auxiliary has already been found in samples of dialectal Finnish recorded in the early 20th century.[1] Even though the construction is not uncommon in colloquial Finnish, little attention has been paid to it in Finnish grammars, as it has mostly been regarded as an exceptional variant of the negative clause.[2]