The article reexamines the status of the so called get-passives in English. The term “ get-passive” is often used to refer to constructions with the verb get and the past participle. The authors claim that this construction involves more heterogeneous types with different semantic and structural properties and that the term passive is misleading, especially when the distinction is blurred. Authors of university grammars, such as Huddleston and Pullum, Quirk et al., and Huddleston, distinguish between verbal and adjectival get-passives comparing them to be-passives. The authors of this article argue that such classification is oversimplified because it lumps together two distinctive types of diathesis, middle and passive voice. Namely, they claim that get+past participle ( get+pp) constructions are best described as a diathesis continuum from active to passive poles, covering a range of events in which the active role of the subject is gradually diminished. A comparative analysis with Macedonian and Greek is included to show that the equivalents of get+pp constructions are not all passive and copular constructions. They also include active get+pp constructions, where the verb get is an inchoative or decausative marker. The article focuses on these “nonpassive” get+ pp constructions and attempts to establish a semantic link among the different types as well as between them and the passive get-constructions.
This article investigates phenomena related to subject pronoun realization in the English interlanguage of Macedonian learners. Preliminary research indicates that learners tend to omit the subject pronoun in both referential and non-referential contexts. It can be presumed that such interlanguage features are due to crosslinguistic influence, given that Macedonian is a pro-drop language and makes no use of a dummy pronoun. The goal of this article is to determine the distribution of these phenomena at four proficiency levels: beginners (A1), elementary (A2), pre-intermediate (B1) and upper-intermediate (B2) for children up to 15 years of age. This research is supplemented by a questionnaire in which learners at the same age and proficiency level are asked to judge the grammaticality of correct and erroneous sentences from the corpus. The results from both studies serve as a basis for postulating the acquisition sequence of subject realization in the learner language and also shed light on the reasons for these types of divergence from the L2 norm.
The authors analyze the occurrence of habere-perfect in two formal registers that are supposed to be the least influenced by regional use. The goal of the paper is to establish how and why habere-perfect is spread in standard Macedonian. The corpus-based analysis shows that the perfect enters and spreads in the standard in a systematic way, through certain semantic verb classes in privileged contexts. It is claimed that habere-perfect favors light verb collocations with verbs of acquisition in possessive-existential contexts. The findings support the thesis that the most frequently encountered have-perfect type is used in functions characteristic of the early stages of grammaticalization.
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