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Article published In:
Variation and Grammaticalization of Verbal Constructions
Edited by Dániel Czicza and Gabriele Diewald
[Constructions and Frames 14:1] 2022
► pp. 78–120

The affactive få ‘get’ construction in Danish

Afficiaries, agentivity and voice

| University of Southern Denmark

As in many other Germanic languages, Modern Danish combines the verb få ‘get’ and a semantic main verb in the supine form (the uninflected perfect participle). Three main types of the construction are found: an agentive type typically interpreted as expressing successful intentional action and two non-agentive types: one with a ditransitive main verb and promotion of the indirect object to subject status, and one with a non-valency-bound subject typically interpreted as a Beneficiary. Based on a functional framework, the paper presents a corpus study of the construction and an analysis unifying all three main types in a common Affactive Construction whose functional contribution is the specification of the subject as an Afficiary (Beneficiary or Maleficiary). The distinction between agentive and non-agentive interpretation is analysed as a voice distinction between active and passive.

Keywords: affaction, beneficiary, maleficiary, ‘get’ verbs, agentivity, voice, telicity
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2. Få ‘get’ + supine in Danish
  • 3.Previous studies
    • 3.1Hansen & Heltoft’s non-integrated constructions
    • 3.2Other previous treatments
    • 3.3Discussion of previous studies
  • 4.The corpus study
    • 4.1Questions to answer and design of the study
    • 4.2Agentivity
    • 4.3Telicity
    • 4.4Transitivity
    • 4.5Malefactive predicates
    • 4.6Subject referents
    • 4.7The AC and expressions of purpose and achievement
    • 4.8Discussion of the corpus results
  • 5.The Affactive Construction
    • 5.1Afficiary and agent
    • 5.2Coded content, variants and semantic affinities
    • 5.3Voice: Active and passive AC
    • 5.4The taxonomy of AC types
    • 5.5Non-human subjects and subjectification
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 9 August 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cf.00059.nie
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