| Summary: | Abstract The study focuses on the t-ending infinitive in North Saami and the first infinitive short form in Finnish in the context of the verbs leat ’be’ and olla ’be’, respectively. The study compares the use of the infinitives in structures that are the same in both languages and structures that occur in one language but have no equivalent in the other. The same structure may also have divergent meanings in the two languages. The study investigates the grammatical structure of infinitives as well as the use and meaning of infinitival phrases in the following environments: 1) infinitival phrases as subjects, 2) basic infinitives in the context of nouns and adjectives, 3) cases of the lei/oli infinitive (a variant of the conditional perfect in Saami and a structure that implicates ’being close’ in Finnish), 4) the relative infinitive and 5) the supine structure in Saami. The material for the study comes from North-Saami and Finnish fiction that was published in 1979–1997: it comprises texts from 18 authors in both languages. The study is qualitative. It moves from Saami to Finnish and also vice versa, being thus of bidirectional character. Its emphasis, however, is on Saami. The data include original texts in both languages as well as translations from Saami into Finnish by the researcher. The study examines infinitive structures in North Saami and Finnish, separately as well as together, and reports on their similarities and differences based either on syntactic analysis, semantic analysis or both. Tiivistelmä Tutkimuksen kohteena on pohjoissaamen ja suomen perusinfinitiivimuoto yhdessä saamen leat ’olla’-verbin ja suomen olla-verbin kanssa. Tutkimuksessa verrataan kielten perusinfinitiivin käyttöä rakenteissa, jotka ovat kummassakin kielessä samoja, ja rakenteissa, joilla ei ole vastinetta toisessa kielessä. Sama rakenne voi olla kielissä myös merkitykseltään erilainen. Tarkastelun kohteena on infinitiivin kieliopillinen rakenne ja infinitiivilausekkeen käyttö sekä merkitys seuraavissa tapauksissa: 1) ...
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