Panema-verb ja selle grammatilised kasutused
The verb panema ‘put’ and its grammatical functions

Summary/Abstract: The article analyses the use of the Estonian core verb panema ‘put’ in written Estonian. It describes the polysemy of the verb panema and focuses on its grammatical constructions. Numerous lexical and grammatical usages of panema are presented as a network of meanings and functions. The material for examining the verb panema was collected from corpora containing texts from the 16th century until the present. Over 3000 instances of the verb panema were included in the study. The panema instances were divided into meaning groups. Its lexical meanings are ‘to change the location of an object in space’ (the most frequent meaning in each period), ‘to set (something or someone) in another position, state or situation’, ‘to appoint’ and ‘to consider, to take (someone) for’. The verb panema appears in the causative construction, expressing causativity (causer + panema + causee + Vma-inf), and in the phasal construction, expressing an initial phase (agent + Vma-inf + panema; or in form of fixed expressions). The lexical meaning ‘to change the location of an object in space’ is present, to a lesser or greater extent, in every meaning. A remarkable number of panema cases are figurative. The analysis of the panema-causative, which nowadays makes up 10–15 per cent of all panema cases, brings out a wide range of construction types. The panema-causative consists of a subject, an object, the verb panema and a -ma infinitive. The components of the construction have different semantic roles, which combine with each other in several ways. Altogether, there are 21 different types of the panema-causative, the most frequent ones being agent-patient-process (15.7 per cent), force-patient-process (14.8 per cent), agent-patient-action (12.7 per cent) and agent-patient-state (12.0 per cent). The phasal construction tends to be less frequent in texts, remaining around one per cent. Recently, various cases in which the verb panema adds expressivity to a fixed expression or replaces other verbs, have appeared.

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