INTRODUCTION
In his pioneering study of the passive in English, Svartvik (1 966: 93) comments on the confused
picture that is presented by writers who have offered views on the status of get as a
passive auxiliary (a situation which he attributes largely to a widespread failure to apply
formal criteria). Since 1966 not a great deal seems to have changed: the get-passive construction
remains the subject of widespread disagreement.
There are, for instance, marked differences in the delimitation of the class. In her discussion
of get-passives Stein (1 979: 46-47) includes examples such as Let’sget started and She
got completely lost, which are disallowed by Granger (1 983) and Siewierska (1 984) on the
grounds that they do not allow the expression of - or even imply - an agent and consequently
there is no possibility of alternation with an active clause.
We find differing opinions in the literature regarding the conversational implicatures
conveyed by get-passives. According to Lakoff (1 97 1) get-passives convey the speaker’s
personal involvement, by contrast with the greater neutrality of the be-passive. However,
Chappell(l980) claims that get-passives reflect the speaker’s opinion rather than personal
involvement; in particular, whether the event(s) described are perceived as having fortunate
consequences for the subject (as in Jane’s bikegotfixed) or unfortunate consequences (as in
Jane’s bike got stolen).
The problem is not so much confusion and disagreement, as a lack of supporting
evidence, when we consider comments made concerning the stylistic and regional distribution
of get-passives (such as that by Quirk et al. (1 985: 16 1) and Huddleston (1 984: 16 1)
that get-passives tend to be avoided in more formal styles, and that by Sussex (1982) that
they are more common in North American English than Australian English, and more
common in the latter than in British English).
The present study aims to explore issues which have been the subject of controversy
using a solidly corpus-based approach. The approach will, it is anticipated, alleviate many
of the problems caused by insufficient and inadequate data, not just in determining the distribution
of get-passives but also in describing their syntactic and semantic properties. In
studies where introspectively-derived examples are used, we find sentences presented without
comment which would be regarded as unacceptable by many (e.g. Lakoff’s (1 97 1 : 154)
My cache of marijuana got found by Fido, the police dog), while others which would be
accepted by most are rejected (e.g. Hatcher’s (1949: 435) He gotfired by the superintendent).
Meanwhile, in none of the major corpus-based book-length studies of the passive in
English is the corpus used of sufficient dimensions to provide an adequate supply of getpassives.
Svartvik (1966: 149) observes that, in his 323,000-word corpus, ‘there are not
even half a dozen agentive get-passives;’ Granger (1983) notes that of the 53 get Ven
tokens in her 160,000-word corpus only nine are genuinely passive in the sense of standing
in direct alternation with an active; and of 47 get Ven forms listed by Stein (1 979) from her 166,000-word corpus, Granger allows only six as genuinely passive.
المادة المعروضة اعلاه هي مدخل الى المحاضرة المرفوعة بواسطة استاذ(ة) المادة . وقد تبدو لك غير متكاملة . حيث يضع استاذ المادة في بعض الاحيان فقط الجزء الاول من المحاضرة من اجل الاطلاع على ما ستقوم بتحميله لاحقا . في نظام التعليم الالكتروني نوفر هذه الخدمة لكي نبقيك على اطلاع حول محتوى الملف الذي ستقوم بتحميله .
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