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Part of
New Approaches to English Linguistics: Building bridges
Edited by Olga Timofeeva, Anne-Christine Gardner, Alpo Honkapohja and Sarah Chevalier
[Studies in Language Companion Series 177] 2016
► pp. 117–140

Dialect contact influences on the use of get and the get-passive

| Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich
get is a highly frequent and multifunctional English verb but has so far gone unnoticed in variationist studies of World Englishes. This study aims at exploring to what extent dialect contact contributes to the variation of get in British, Jamaican, and Singaporean English, in particular to variation in the frequencies of its word-forms and in the use of the get-passive. For that purpose, all tokens of get in the ICE (International Corpus of English) corpora of Great Britain, Jamaica, and Singapore were analysed for form and meaning. The results demonstrate that influence from the major standard varieties British and American English as well as substrate influence can be made responsible for the variation of get.
Keywords: GET-passive, word-forms, World Englishes, substrate influence, dialect contact
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Token frequencies of get and its word-forms
    • 2.1Overall token frequencies of get across varieties
    • 2.2The distribution of the word-forms of get across varieties
  • 3.The get-passive
    • 3.1The nature of the (get-) passive
    • 3.2Factors influencing the variation of the get-passive
      • 3.2.1Prescriptivism
      • 3.2.2Colloquialisation
      • 3.2.3Substrate influence
      • 3.2.4Mode
    • 3.3The special meaning and use of the get-passive
    • 3.4Summary of the hypotheses
    • 3.5Results from the data
      • 3.5.1Frequencies
      • 3.5.2Mode
      • 3.5.3Use and meaning
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 1 November 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.177.05bru
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