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Get ‐passives in English
Author(s) -
COLLINS PETER C.
Publication year - 1996
Publication title -
world englishes
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.6
H-Index - 49
eISSN - 1467-971X
pISSN - 0883-2919
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-971x.1996.tb00091.x
Subject(s) - participle , linguistics , referent , implicature , american english , middle english , history of english , complementizer , subject (documents) , english grammar , computer science , noun , british english , set (abstract data type) , variation (astronomy) , verb , psychology , pragmatics , grammar , philosophy , physics , library science , astrophysics , programming language
A number of claims and counter‐claims which have been made concerning get ‐passives in English are tested via interrogation of a set of written and spoken corpora. Get ‐passives are shown to form a fuzzy set, with about one‐third of corpus tokens belonging to a ‘core’ whose members have an explicit or at least accessible agent‐phrase, a lexical verb with typically dynamic meaning, and which alternate with an active clause. Beyond the core there are a number of subclasses displaying progressively fewer features in common with core members. On the borderline of the set are copular constructions, with get a ‘resulting copula’ and the participle fully adjectivalized. The data suggest that get ‐passives are very often associated with two types of pragmatic implicature: one, that the subject‐referent is responsible for initiating the process (very evident in the semantically‐related complex reflexive construction); the other, that the process is (usually) unfavourable or (less often) favourable for the subject‐referent. Finally, the corpus provides evidence of at least three types of variation with get ‐passives: regional (their frequency is comparable in American English and British English, higher in Australian English than in both of these, and higher in Indian English than in Australian English); stylistic (they tend to be avoided in more formal styles); and diachronic (they are increasing in popularity over time in Australian English, and probably in the other varieties).