The origin of passive get

Abstract

The history of English passive get is examined, in an attempt to determine both the diachronic pathway of development and the linguistic mechanism of syntactic change. Passive get (as in He got arrested) is shown to have developed from inchoative get (He got sick), and not from causative get (He got himself arrested). Passive get arose in cases where inchoative get took an adjectival passive participle as complement and where viewpoint aspect was perfective. Perfective aspect, which yields a bounded-event reading, encouraged the reanalysis of the adjectival passive participle as a verbal passive participle. Though the pathway of change is the same as that identified by Gronemeyer (1999), the mechanism of change proposed here is novel. The theoretical import of the article is to show how semantic and pragmatic factors like aspect influence morphosyntactic reanalysis, and thereby to raise our expectations about what constitutes a plausible reanalysis and improve our understanding of syntactic change more generally.

A Comparison of the Grammatical Production of Child Heritage Speakers of Spanish across Language and Grade: Kindergarten and Grade 1

“…In Mitkovska and Bužarovska's distinction of be-passives from get-passives, they support other findings that canonical passive features (explicit or implicit agent, and active counterparts are often missing in get-passives [25][26][27][28]). The work of Bruhn de Garavito and Valenzuela in Spanish recognizes that there are two different passive constructions: the eventive passive with the copula ser ('to be') and the adjectival passive with estar ('to be') [29].…”

On the Origin and Development of the Get-Passive: With Special Reference to Grammaticalization

“…This implies that it is unlikely that the origin of the get-passive is the get-causative as Toyota (2008) and Hundt (2001) claim, because causative get typically takes verbal passive participles as its complements. Instead, the hypothesis suggested by Fleisher (2006) will be supported that the origin of the get-passive is "inchoative get + predicative adjective": the get-passive would have been derived by inserting adjectival passive participles as complements to inchoative get taking predicative adjectives.…”

“…One of the remarkable features in Fleisher's (2006) analysis is that it makes a distinction between adjectival and verbal passive participles, on the basis of which he argues that the origin of the get-passive is "inchoative get + predicative adjective." As we will see below, this paper partly concurs with his analysis, but there are at least two problems with it.…”

English Get-Passive Constructions: A Corpus-Based Approach

“…see, among others, Collins 1996, Fleisher 2006, and Hundt 2001. To fill this gap, we have searched the corpora COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English) and COHA (Corpus of Historical American English), both of which are freely available online.…”