Norwegian få ‘get’: A survey of its uses in present-day Riksmål/Bokmål

Abstract

The present survey of the uses of the Norwegian verb få ‘get’ is based on its converse relationship to the three-place achievement predicate gi ‘give’, which combines with an agentive subject, a recipient indirect object and a direct object. The syntactic constructions in which få appears and their relative frequency of occurrence are described on the basis of a corpus consisting of 779 examples from works of present-day Norwegian fictional and nonfictional prose. About 60% of the examples have NP or PP arguments only and about 40% show, in addition or only, a nonfinite verb form. The former group of constructions comprises numerous examples representing syntactically complex lexical predicates. The latter group consists of four different construction types that show grammaticalization features: causative with an infinitive with the marker å (å-infinitive); modal with the bare infinitive; “recipient passive” with a passive past participle; and “resultative active” with an active past participle. In addition, there is an “infinitival relative” construction where an å-infinitive is adjoined to the object of få. These various types of constructions are investigated with regard to the extent to which the arguments of få reflect or deviate from the semantic properties of gi in the basic use of this verb as a three-place achievement predicate.