Vol. 43:3 (2022) ► pp.330–356
The get-passive in Tyneside English
A highly frequent yet constrained variant
This paper provides a quantitative variationist analysis of the distribution of get- versus be-passives in spoken Tyneside English. Taking data from the Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (1960s to 2010), the paper uses mixed-effects modelling to examine a wide range of possible constraints on the distribution of get versus be, some of which have been discussed at length in the literature on the get-passive (e.g. subject animacy, adversative semantics) and some of which have received less attention (e.g. grammatical person, tense, aspectuality). It demonstrates that the use of the get-passive is determined by a complex combination of semantic and syntactic factors (subject animacy, telicity, non-neutral semantics, tense and grammatical person). Moreover, it argues that, despite the dramatic rise in frequency of get-passives over time (with younger speakers using them even more frequently than be-passives), most of the constraints remain in place and the variant is pragmatically marked. This stands in sharp contrast to the findings of recent investigations into the grammaticalization of get-passives in standard British and American English, which found that increased frequency in those varieties was also accompanied by semantic bleaching and generalization.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.The get-passive and its origins
- 3.The get-passive in Tyneside: Data collection and analysis
- 3.1Data collection: DECTE
- 3.2Contexts for the variation of get versus be
- 3.2.1Animacy of subject
- 3.2.2Semantic context
- 3.2.3Aspectuality
- 3.2.4Presence of a human by-agent
- 3.2.5Tense and grammatical person
- 3.2.6Other syntactic variables
- 3.2.7Sociolinguistic factors
- 4.Results
- 4.1Overall frequency analysis
- 4.2Multivariate analysis
- 5.Discussion
- 6.Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
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References
https://doi.org/10.1075/eww.21039.feh