This paper contributes to the study of grammaticalization phenomena from the perspective of Construction Grammar
(
Coussé et al. 2018). It is concerned with modal uses of the English verb
get that express a permitted action, as in
The prisoners always get to make one phone call.
Different views exist on the contexts in which permissive
get emerged. Gronemeyer (
1999: 30) suggests that the permissive meaning derives from causative uses (
I got him to
confess). An alternative is proposed by van der Auwera et al. (
2009: 283),
who view permissive
get as an extension of its acquisitive meaning (
I got a present). We revisit
these claims in the light of recent historical data from American English. Specifically, we searched the COHA (
Davies 2010) for forms of
get followed by
to and a verb
in the infinitive. Besides examples of permissive
get, we retrieved examples of obligative
got
to (
I got to leave), causative
get (
Who did you get to confess?),
possessive
got (
What have I got to be ashamed of?), and a category that we label inchoative
get (
You’re getting to be a big girl now). Drawing on distributional semantic techniques
(
Perek 2016,
2018), we analyse how
permissive
get and inchoative
get developed semantically over time. Our results are consistent
with an account that represents an alternative to both
Gronemeyer (1999) and
van der Auwera et al. (2009), namely the idea that permissive
get
evolved out of inchoative uses that invited the idea of a permission.