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.
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(2021) Ten lectures on Diachronic Construction Grammar. Brill.
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(2004) Lexicalization and grammaticization: Opposite or orthogonal? In W. Bisang, N. P. Himmelmann & B. Wiemer (Eds.), What makes grammaticalization: A look from its components and its fringes (pp. 21–42). Mouton de Gruyter.
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(1991) On some principles of grammaticization. In E. C. Traugott & B. Heine (Eds.), Approaches to grammaticalization: Volume I. Theoretical and methodological issues (pp. 17–36). John Benjamins.
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(1996) Towards a unified account of the syntax and semantics of GET. In J. Thomas & M. Short (Eds.), Using corpora for language research: Studies in the honour of Geoffrey Leech (pp. 57–75). Longman.
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(1973) GET. In J. P. Kimball (Ed.), Syntax and Semantics. Vol. 2 (pp. 205–215). Seminar Press.
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(2000) Emerging English modals: A corpus-based study of grammaticalization. Mouton de Gruyter.
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(2016) Using distributional semantics to study syntactic productivity in diachrony: A case study. Linguistics,
54
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Perek, F.
(2018) Recent change in the productivity and schematicity of the way-construction: A distributional semantic analysis. Corpus Linguistic and Linguistic Theory, 14(1), 65–97.
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(2015) Grammaticalization of the verb ‘to acquire’ into modality: A case study in Vietnamese. Taiwan Journal of Linguistics,
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(2010) Towards grammaticalization: Lithuanian acquisitive verbs gauti (‘get’) and tekti (‘be gotten’). Acta Linguistica Hafniensia,
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This list is based on CrossRef data as of 20 march 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
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