On permissive construction in the 17th and 18th century written Estonian The permissive construction expresses allowing and enabling, but also the concepts of request, command or letting to do which belong to the same network with the abovementioned notions. The construction consists of a main verb having the meaning of allowing, enabling, command ment or request and the dainfinitive (or ma-infinitive in the old written Estonian) and has a stable argument structure. What is characteristic of the construction is that the addressee of the command or request (in contemporary language use mainly in adessive) is present: Ema Iasi lastel pidupdeva puhul Mother-NOM-SG let-IPFV -3SG child-ADE-PL red.letter.day-POSS-SG occasion- ADE-SG kauem üleval alla. late-COMP up-ADV be-INF 'On the occasion of the red-Ietter-day the mother let the children stay up later' This article gives an overview of a) what the permissive construction was like in older written Estonian, b) what the form of the members of the construction (the agent, the secondary logical subject and the infinitive) is and c) if different authors use these constructions differently. The theoretical background of the study is construction grammar (Goldberg 1995) and the study has been modell ed on JaakIm Leino's dissertation on the pernlissive constructions in Finnish. When comparing the constructions of written sources of the 17th and the 18th centuries to the 20th century language use represented in the Corpus of Written Estonian, it can be seen that the relative importance of the verb laskma ("to let") in perrnissive constructions has considerably decreased. Instead a new derived verb voimaldama ("to enable") is used; in addition lubama ("to allow") and paluma ("to ask for") have become more frequently used. Lubama ("to allow") has taken over many meanings of allowing of the verb laskma ("to let"). The case of the secondary logical subject varies less, as weil. The obligatory arguments in the central scheme of the permissive constructions occurring in the 17th and 18th century written Estonian include the main verb and the infinitive; the agent and the secondary logical subject - the logicaI members of permission, request or command - can remain implicit. When it comes to forming the logicaI subject, a great variation in the case form can be noted. In the texts by the most productive author of the 17th century - Heinrich Stahl - and by the somewhat more moderately represented Christoph Blume also supine has been used in permissive constructions alongside the dainfinitive, while only the da-infinitive has been used by Müller and in the 18th century texts. As can be assumed from the nature of the texts, the agent is most often a divi ne creature. The question of the origin of the construction needs further research. In general the Estonian and German sentences match word for word and it can be supposed that the German text has been the model for forming the permissive construction.