Get‐passives in English

Abstract

ABSTRACT: 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).