English Get-Passive Constructions

The get-passive in English appears to be free variation with the be-passive in terms of propositional meaning. The former, however, displays quite distinctive grammatical properties from the latter in many respects. This paper reviews some grammatical properties of the get-passive construction and discusses the corpus findings of the data in question, focusing on the contemporary American English. The corpus search shows us that the choice of the get-passive depends not only on the dynamic properties of the main verb alone but also on the tight interactions among various grammatical components including the subject’s animacy and its responsibility, eventuality type, and speaker’s perspective. Pointing out the fact that the recent increase in its usages also reflects social changes, the paper also suggests tight syntactic and semantic links between the intransitive get-passive and transitive get-passive.