What is it about?
Passive sentences with "get" instead of "be" (like "he got shot" instead of "he was shot") are becoming more and more frequent in written American English. These get-passives are still not nearly as common as passive sentences with be, but they are beginning to change such that their use is more similar to be-passives. This study uses corpus data to explore these recent developments in the use of the get-passive, which are interpreted in light of grammaticalization.
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Why is it important?
The change observed in the study is in the situation types (a kind of temporal semantics that goes beyond tense and aspect) that get-passives have been used in over time. The study is the first that I am aware of that tracks the situation type of get-passives, and shows how changing situation type shows continued spread of get-passives to new linguistic contexts in the process of grammaticalization. The study also offers a replicable means of classifying corpus linguistic data by situation type, which may be fruitful in studies of other grammatical constructions as well.
Perspectives
This article led to further insights about the key role of situation type in the acceptability of different kinds of passive constructions. I have followed up this research on other kinds of passives, too (such as the prepositional passive, as in "she was sent for"), and found that whether or not an action is conclusive (telic) is of great importance in this kind of passive as well. As with other studies of linguistic change, it is ultimately the point of the study that language change is natural, constant, and not to be feared.
Sarah Schwarz
Uppsala Universitet
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: “Like getting nibbled to death by a duck”, English World-Wide A Journal of Varieties of English, December 2017, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/eww.38.3.03sch.
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