CONDITIONING FACTORS FOR THE CHOICE OF GET-PASSIVES IN ENGLISH: A CORPUS STUDY
Abstract
This paper is part of the ongoing research project concerning the syntax of passive construction in English. Passive construction is notorious in both linguistics and education for its complex structures, varied meanings and implications, and the presence of numerous comparable constructions. To tackle these challenges, the purpose of this project is twofold. First, it contributes to a comparative study of the passive construction in English, Japanese, and other languages. Second, it contributes to pedagogy. To reach these aims, this paper uses a variationist framework to analyze a corpus of English passives. It also extends to descriptive and generative frameworks. The present study analyzes the English passives, specifically be-passives and get-passives, in Quebec, Canada, to identify the conditioning factors influencing their selection. The tokens of the passive sentences are examined in terms of their relations to age, sex, and social classes, as well as syntactic properties (e.g., agentivity). It is proposed that the choice of getpassives is affected by three independent factors: age, the presence or absence of a by-phrase, and the types of verbs used and how they are subcategorized and dynamic. Even though the corpus used in this study is fairly small, it contributes to the field by looking at a type of passive construction that has not been looked at much from different theoretical and descriptive angles. It also makes suggestions about how to do the research and what these findings mean for the form-meaning interface.
Full text article
References
Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S., & Finegan, E.
(1999). Longman grammar of spoken and written English. Harlow,
England: Pearson Educational Limited.
Byun, J. (2013). To be or to get? Diachronic and synchronic considerations
on get- and be-passives. Seoul National University Working Papers in
English Linguistics and Language, 11, 1–19.
Carter, R., & McCarthy, M. (1999). The English get-passive in spoken
discourse: Description and implications for an interpersonal
grammar. English Language and Linguistics, 3(1), 41–58.
Carter, R., & McCarthy, M. (2006). Cambridge grammar of English: A
comprehensive guide, spoken and written English grammar and usage.
Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Cheshire, J. (2005). Syntactic variation and spoken language. In L. Cornips
& K. Corrigan (Eds.), Syntax and variation: Reconciling the biological and
the social (pp. 81–106). Amsterdam, Netherlands: John Benjamins.
Curme, G. O. (1935). Grammar of the English language: Volume 1: Parts
of speech. Essex, England: Verbatim.
Dixon, R. M. W. (2005). A semantic approach to English grammar. Oxford,
England: Oxford University Press.
Dowty, D. (1979). Word meaning and Montague grammar. Dordrecht,
Netherlands: Reidel Publishing Company.
Feagin, C. (1979). Variation and change in Alabama English: A
sociolinguistic study of the white community. Washington, DC: Georgetown
University Press.
Fleisher, N. (2005). Passive get, causative get, and the phasehood of passive
vP. Proceedings from the Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society,
41(1), 59–67.
Francis, W. N. (1958). The structure of American English. New York, NY:
Ronald Press Co.
Frary, L. G. (1929). Studies in the syntax of the Old English passive with
special reference to the use of wesan and weorðan. Language, 5(3), 7–79.
Fries, C. C. (1940). American English grammar. New York, NY: National
Council of Teachers of English.
Greenbaum, S., Leech, G., & Svartvik, J. (1972). A grammar of
contemporary English. London, England: Longman.
Haegeman, L. (1985). The get-passive and Burzio’s generalization. Lingua,
66, 53–77.
Hatcher, A. G. (1949). To get/be invited. Modern Language Notes, 64(7),
433–446.
Hoshi, H. (1999). Passives. In N. Tsujimura (Ed.), The Handbook of
Japanese Linguistics (pp. 191–235). Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Howard, I., & Niyekawa-Howard, A. M. (1976). Passivization. In M.
Shibatani (Ed.), Japanese generative grammar (pp. 201–237). New York,
NY: Academic Press.
Huang, L. (2000). Verb classification in Mayrinax Atayal. Oceanic
Linguistics, 39(2), 364–390.
Ishizuka, T. (2017). The passive voice.In M. Shibatani, et al. (Eds.),
Handbook of Japanese Syntax (pp. 403 – 446). Boston/Berin. Mouton De
Gruyter. DOI 10.1515/9781614516613-012
Jespersen, O. (1909–1949). Modern English grammar on historical
principles (Parts 1–7). London, England: Allen & Unwin.
Kim, K. (2012). External-introducing heads: Voice and Appl. In M. C.
Cuervo & Y. Roberge (Eds.), The end of argument structure? (pp. 131–
154). Bingley, England: Emerald Group Publishing.
Kubo, M. (1992). Japanese passives. In Working papers of the Department
of Languages and Cultures (Vol. 23, pp. 231–302). Sapporo, Japan:
University of Hokkaido.
Kuno, S. (1973). The structure of the Japanese language. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Kuroda, S.-Y. (1979). On Japanese passives. In B. George, E. Kobayashi, &
M. Inoue (Eds.), Exploring in linguistics: Papers in honor of Kazuko
Inoue (pp. 305–347). Tokyo, Japan: Kenkyusha.
Labov, W. (1972). Language in the inner city. Philadelphia, PA: University
of Pennsylvania Press.
Labov, W. (1975). What is a linguistic fact? Lisse, Netherlands: Peter de
Ridder Press.
Labov, W. (1996). When intuitions fail. In L. McNair, K. Singer, L.
Dolbrin, & M. Aucon (Eds.), Papers from the Parasession on Theory and
Data in Linguistics (pp. 77–106). Chicago, IL: Chicago Linguistic Society.
Labov, W., Cohen, P., Robins, C., & Lewis, J. (1968). A study of the nonstandard English of Negro and Puerto Rican speakers in New York City.
Philadelphia, PA: U.S. Regional Survey.
Lakoff, R. (1971). Passive resistance. Proceedings of the Chicago Linguistic
Society, 7, 149–162.
Langacker, R. W. (2000). Grammar and conceptualization. New York, NY:
Mouton de Gruyter.
Lavandera, B. R. (1978). Where does the sociolinguistic variable
stop? Language in Society, 7(2), 171–182.
Levin, B. (1993). English verb classes and alternations: A preliminary
investigation. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Macaulay, R. (1991). Locating dialect in discourse: The language of honest
men and bonnie lassies in Ayr. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Medina, P. G. (2009). Semantic and pragmatic constraints on the English
get-passive. In C. Butler & J. Martín Arista (Eds.), Deconstructing
constructions (pp. 271–294). Amsterdam, Netherlands: John Benjamins
Publishing.
Mihara, K. (1994). Nihongono tougo kouzou [Japanese syntactic
structures]. Tokyo, Japan: Shohakusha.
Mihara, K., & Hiraiwa, K. (2004). Shin Nihongono tougo kouzou [Japanese
syntactic structures, new edition]. Tokyo, Japan: Shohakusha.
Miyagawa, S. (1989). Structure and case marking in Japanese. San Diego,
CA: Academic Press.
Morita, H. (2012). The Japanese passives revisited. Annual Bulletin of Aichi
Prefectural University, 44, 49–75.
Poplack, S., Walker, J., & Malcolmson, R. (2006). An English “like no
other”? Language contact and change in Quebec. Canadian Journal of
Linguistics, 51(2–3), 185–213.
Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G., & Svartvik, J. (1972). A grammar of
contemporary English. London, England: Longman.
Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G., & Svartvik, J. (1985). A
comprehensive grammar of the English language. Harlow, England:
Pearson Education Limited.
Rickford, J. R. (1985). Ethnicity as a sociolinguistic boundary. American
Speech, 60(2), 99–125.
Riddle, E., & Sheintuch, G. (1983). A functional analysis of pseudopassives. Linguistics and Philosophy, 6(4), 527–563.
Sankoff, G., & Laberge, S. (1978). The linguistic market and the statistical
explanation of variability. In D. Sankoff (Ed.), Linguistic variation: Models
and methods (pp. 239–250). New York, NY: Academic Press.
Schleef, E., & Meyerhoff, M. (2010). Sociolinguistic methods for data
collection and interpretation. In M. Meyerhoff & E. Schleef (Eds.), The
Routledge sociolinguistics reader (pp. 1–26). New York, NY/London,
England: Routledge.
Shibatani, M. (1983). Sociolinguistics and transformational grammar. Ohak
Yonku, 19, 103–112.
Shibatani, M. (1990). The languages of Japan. Cambridge, England:
Cambridge University Press.
Siewierska, A., & Bakker, D. (2013). Passive agents: Prototypical vs.
canonical passives. In D. Brown, M. Chumakina, & G. G. J. Corbett
(Eds.), Canonical morphology and syntax (pp. 151–189). Oxford, England:
Oxford University Press.
Svartvik, J. (1966). On voice in the English verb. The Hague, Netherlands:
Mouton & Co.
Tomasello, M. (Ed.). (1998/2003). The new psychology of language:
Cognitive and functional approaches to language structure. Mahwah, NJ:
Erlbaum.
Weiner, J., & Labov, W. (1983). Constraints on the agentless
passive. Journal of Linguistics, 19(1), 29–58.
Authors
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Licensed under the Creative
Commons Attribution International License
(CC BY 4.0).
Copyright © by author(s).