In the Finnish language, there is a group of verbs which take the construction [subject + verb + object + 3rd infinitive illative] and mean "persuading (someone to do something)" or "conducting (someone/something to an act)". In this presentation I focus on two of such verbs, namely panna 'put' and saada 'get'. Two verbs deserve special attention not only because of their high frequency but because they deviate from others in several points: 1) the meaning of the verb is abstracted and thus grammaticalized; 2) it is entailed that the event expressed by the 'embedded' predicate (formed by the object and the 3rd infinitive) is accomplished. These allow us to characterize the two verbs as constructing analytic causative constructions.
In spite of the striking similarities, the difference of the verbs often resides in the sharp semantic difference. Intuitively, the notion of the directness of causation would account for the difference of panna causative and saada causative. This supports the following distributional observation: if the situation requires the causer to instigate the causee directly, saada cannot be used; conversely, if the causer cannot directly affect the causee, the use of saada is necessary.
| (1) | Muutamat | joukkueet | {panevat/?saavat} | rahaa | haisemaan |
| several | team.PL.NOM | {put.3PL/get.3PL} | money.PAR | stink.3INF.ILL | |
| "Some teams make the money reek abundantly" | |||||
| (2) | show, | joka | {saa/*panee} | Irangaten | unohtumaan |
| show | which.NOM | {get.3SG/put.3SG} | Irangate.ACC | be_forgotten.3INF.ILL | |
| "The show which gets the Irangate incident forgotten" | |||||
However, the notion of indirect causation is not sufficient to describe the usage of saada causative: The saada variant of (1) is possible if we interpret it modally, i.e. as expressing the 'wish' of the speaker (or of someone other than the causer herself). In this case the verb saada is actually well compatible with direct causation.
If one closely looks at the verbs appearing in the embedded predicate, a strong tendency is found with the saada causative: in the examples found in the corpus of Suomen Kuvalehti, 70% of the infinitive verbs co-occurring with saada were intransitives of which subject corresponds to the object of the corresponding transitive, not to the subject of it (e.g. unohtua 'be forgotten' (intr.) < unohtaa 'forget' (tr.)). On the contrary, this type of 3rd infinitive remains marginal with the main verb panna, amounting to as much as 30% of the total occurrences. This means that in saada causative the embedded predicate tends to pick up the ultimate target to which a change is brought about. No such tendency is found in panna causative.
Apart from the notion of directness of causation, our data shows that the difference between saada and panna causatives reflects the attitude of the speaker toward the event: while in the former the act of causer itself is focused on, in the latter the change in the state of causee is highlighted.