Analytic Causatives in Finnish: An Analysis of the Embedded Predicate of panna 'put' and saada 'get'

In Finnish, there are a group of verbs which take the construction [subject + verb + object + 3rd infinitive illative] and mean "persuading (someone to do something)" or "conducting (someone to an act)". In this study, I focus on two of such verbs, namely panna 'put' and saada 'get', which deserve special attention. Two verbs are important not only because of their high frequency but because they deviate from others in several points:

1. There is a fair amount of examples where the referent of subject/object is inanimate.
2. The meaning of the verb (panna 'put' and saada 'get', respectively) is abstracted and thus grammaticalized for this particular construction.
3. It is entailed that the event expressed by the 'embedded' predicate (the core of which is formed by the object of the main verb and the 3rd infinitive) is accomplished.

2. & 3. allow us to characterize the construction with saada and panna as the analytic causative construction. The feature 1, however, warns us that the event expressed is not necessarily interpersonal.

However striking the similarities are, the difference of the verb often resides in the sharp semantic difference, as the contrast of examples show. Intuitively, it seems that the difference of panna and saada causative would be accounted for by appealing to the directness/indirectness of causation. Namely, if the causation is necessarily direct, use of panna is appropriate, and when the situation does not allow the causer to directly instigate the causee, panna cannot be used. The following examples illustrate the point:

1. a. Muutamat joukkueet panevat rahaa haisemaan sadoin tuhansin
   b. ?Muutamat joukkueet saavat rahaa haisemaan
   
   "Some teams make the money reek abundantly"
   
   
2. a. show, joka saa Irangaten unohtumaan
   b. *show, joka panee Irangaten unohtumaan
   
   "The show which gets the Irangate incident forgotten"
   

However, it immediately becomes clear that the notion of indirect causation is not a necessary nor the appropriate condition for the usage of saada causative: The example (1b) is possible if we interpret it modally, i.e. as expressing speaker's (or someone other than the causer themselves') 'wish'. In this case the verb saada is actually well compatible with the direct causative.

The argument against the previous analysis above shows that directness of causation (whether the causer instigates the causee directly or indirectly) is not a relevant criteria to characterize the two causatives, however appealing it seems at first sight. Here we are left with the feeling that we return to the initial similarity of them.

If one closely looks at the verbs of embedded predicate which appear in the 3rd infinitive illative form, a strong tendency is found with the main verb saada: in the examples found in the corpus of the Finnish weekly magazine Suomen Kuvalehti, 70% of the infinitive verbs co-occurring with saada were intransitives, whose subject is identical to the object of the corresponding transitive, not the subject of it (e.g. unohtu-a 'be forgotten' (intr.) < unohta-a 'forget' (tr.), see the example (2)). On the contrary, this type of 3rd infinitive is apparently marginal with the main verb panna, amounting only to as much as 30% of the total occurrences.

In this presentation, I concluded that these two verbs, panna and saada, differ with regard to the speaker's point of view, namely, in the former the speaker is interested in the action of causer itself, in the latter the change of state which happens to the causee is foremost important. I conclude that the notion of indirectness can be nicely accounted for in terms what the speaker considers important.