The be‐ versus get‐passive alternation in world Englishes

Abstract

AbstractMultifactorial studies of the be:get‐passive alternation are still rare. On the basis of the International Corpus of English, this is the first investigation to use mixed modelling for the passive alternation in world Englishes. Overall, our findings reveal that regional differences are far less important than language‐internal constraints, with Inner and Outer Circle varieties largely sharing a core grammar. Additionally, while there is qualitative evidence confirming the interchangeability of the two passive allostructions, our generalised‐mixed model reveals that the choice is still heavily influenced by the different semantic origins of the variants, evident not only in the adversative semantics of the get‐passive but also in a tendency to prefer human/animate subjects. The strong prescriptive reaction to the progressive passive in the Late Modern period, however, has not resulted in a marked preference for get over be in progressives in our data.