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The origin of passive get

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 October 2006

NICHOLAS FLEISHER
NICHOLAS FLEISHER
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, 1203 Dwinelle Hall #2650, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-2650, [email protected]
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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.

Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 10 , Issue 2 , November 2006 , pp. 225 - 252
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2006

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Footnotes

Many thanks are due to David Denison and to three anonymous reviewers, whose comments have led to significant improvements to the article. Earlier versions of this work were presented at DIGS VIII at Yale University and at the UC Berkeley Syntax Circle in 2004; I am grateful to those audiences for helpful feedback. Special thanks are due to Andrew Garrett and Line Mikkelsen, who offered invaluable comments, advice, and support throughout the writing of this article.