The Idiomatic Give-Get Alternation in English: A Parallel-Architecture Approach

In English there are idioms that alternate between give and get, as in They gave him the boot (‘They dismissed him’) and He got the boot (‘He was/became dismissed’). They are not isolated but related in terms of the properties they share, such as the same noun phrase(NP) the boot and the verbal meaning ‘to dismiss/to become dismissed’. This paper argues that the two alternantes are better characterised as the level of predicate-argument structure which mediates between semantics and syntax. It suggests that the clause-final NP combines with either of the verbs to form a predicate. The resulting complex predicate is either transitive or intransitive, depending on whether the internal argument is present or absent. Though the former appears syntactically more complex than the latter, both are basically semantic and grammatical units that are internally complex. The paper also offers a unified analysis of the two complex predicate types using the framework of parallel architecture of grammar.