This paper is concerned with the use of the internet in linguistic research. The phenomenon under investigation is the get-passive. In a first step, I will outline reasons for and problems with using the web as a linguistic corpus. After this, I will explain the linguistic phenomenon “get-passive”, taking into account the debate on the term itself, typical characteristics of the get-passive and its diachronic development. The next step will be the description and analysis of the WebCorp study on get-passives as opposed to be-passives. In this way, I hope to be able to show whether the constraints traditionally attributed to get-passives, in particular animacy of the subject, are still in force, or in how far they are lessening, possibly making the get-passive an equivalent contestant to the be-passive. Differences between British and American English will be examined in order to find out whether either variant is more advanced.
Table of contents
1. Introduction
2. Using the World Wide Web as a linguistic corpus
3. The linguistic phenomenon under investigation: the get -passive
3.1. Is the get -passive a true passive?
3.2. Typical characteristics of get -passives
3.3. The diachronic development of get -passives
4. WebCorp Study on the get -passive as opposed to the be- passive
4.1. Research questions
4.2. Methodology
4.2.1. Reasons for choosing WebCorp
4.2.2. The participles under investigation
4.2.3. WebCorp adjustments for the present study
4.2.4. Treatment of the WebCorp output
4.3. Analysis and results
4.3.1. Collocations with shot
4.3.2. Collocations with rejected
4.3.3. Collocations with asked
5. Conclusion
6. Bibliography
1. Introduction
This paper is concerned with the use of the internet in linguistic research. The phenomenon under investigation is the get -passive. In a first step, I will outline reasons for and problems with using the web as a linguistic corpus. After this, I will explain the linguistic phenomenon “get -passive”, taking into account the debate on the term itself, typical characteristics of the get -passive and its diachronic development. The next step will be the description and analysis of the WebCorp study on get -passives as opposed to be -passives. In this way, I hope to be able to show whether the constraints traditionally attributed to get -passives, in particular animacy of the subject, are still in force, or in how far they are lessening, possibly making the get -passive an equivalent contestant to the be -passive. Differences between British and American English will be examined in order to find out whether either variant is more advanced.
2. Using the World Wide Web as a linguistic corpus
Using the web as a linguistic corpus is a fairly new and popular method in linguistic research. The reasons for its attractiveness are obvious: First and foremost, the internet is a huge corpus covering all imaginable text types, which means that it can be used for studying linguistic phenomena which are too infrequent to be found in smaller, traditional corpora, such as the get -passive. Moreover, the web is freely available. This is a big advantage over traditional corpora, which are expensive and time-consuming to build and update (cf. Renouf 2003:39). Another important aspect is the fact that the internet is very much up-to-date: New websites are created every day, so that newly-emerging linguistic phenomena will show much earlier on the web than in any traditional corpus. Furthermore, the internet provides a huge amount of authentic language data (cf. Bergh/Zanchetta forthc.:5), which can be used to study language as it is actually used.
Nevertheless, using the web as a linguistic corpus has several disadvantages as well which have to be mentioned. We do not know what exactly we are looking at when studying web data (cf. e.g. Meyer et al. 2003:242), because we do not know the size and make-up of the internet, and meta-information like text type, authorship and date of publication are largely unspecified. Most pages on the internet are written in English, but probably more than half of the internet users are non-native speakers of English; therefore there are probably many websites in English that are written by non-native speakers (cf. Meyer et al. 2003:243). Another essential disadvantage of the web is that data are not replicable: As new pages are created every day and others deleted, the same research will never yield the same results at different points in time (cf. e.g. Lüdeling et al. 2007:11).
A major problem in using search engines is that they are not designed for linguistic purposes but for commercial ones (cf. Fletcher 2007:30). That is why it is not possible to search directly for grammatical phenomena such as the get -passive, which is an important limitation to the present study. Searches are always confined to lexical items or collocations, even when using the linguistic tool WebCorp, as it is also dependent on the commercial search engines. In fact, we do not even know how search engines like Google work, i.e. which pages they access, in which way they organize their results, why some pages occur several times in the output, etc. Moreover, these criteria change regularly so that we can never really know what type of data we are looking at.
Another problem arises when studying linguistic change: The being up-to-date, usually considered one of the web’s chief advantages, makes it difficult to find data that are old enough to track a linguistic development, which is obviously partly due to the fact that the web itself is still rather young. Moreover, dates of publication for websites are often unknown, so that diachronic studies using the internet alone are hardly possible.
It is important to keep in mind all these disadvantages of the web as a linguistic corpus in order to be able to find meaningful results.
3. The linguistic phenomenon under investigation: the get -passive
3.1. Is the get -passive a true passive?
The get -passive is “among the faster-spreading recent grammatical innovations in English” (Mair 2006:111). Nevertheless, there is considerable debate on whether it is a true passive or only a structurally similar form with a passive-like meaning, an opinion which is favoured by Hundt (2001:51), who is reluctant to call the construction get + past participle“get- passive”.
There are several reasons why it is difficult to categorize get + past participle constructions as get -passives. First of all, get is not a real auxiliary like be (cf. Quirk et al. 1985:160), as it cannot, for example, be placed before a negation, cannot be used in contracted forms and is not inverted in questions etc. like other auxiliaries (cf. Quirk et al. 1985: 121 ff.).
Moreover, not all constructions of the type get + past participle have a passive-like meaning (cf. Mair 2006:111 f.). The form also subsumes idiomatic constructions like get lost or get rid of, which do not have active analogues. Also inchoative phrases like get dressed or get married cannot be considered passives, because they have a middle semantics and get is rather a resulting copula than a passive auxiliary (cf. Quirk et al. 1985:161).
Despite these reasons to question the passive-status of get + past participle constructions, I will use the term get -passive in this paper, because I will not be concerned with idiomatic constructions and inchoative uses and rather focus on instances that are as passive-like as possible.
3.2. Typical characteristics of get -passives
Colloquial style
According to most grammars of English, one of the main characteristics of the get -passive is its colloquial nature. Quirk et al. (1985:161) as well as Huddleston et al. (2003:1442) state that it is “avoided in formal style”, and Biber et al. (1999:481) maintain that get -passives are normally limited to conversation. The be -passive, in contrast, is said to be the more neutral variant.
Subject responsibility
There is also consent about the fact that get -passives focus more than be -passives on the subject of an action. Quirk et al. (1985:161) state that the get -passive “puts the emphasis on the subject rather than the agent, and on what happens to the subject as a result of the event”. Vanrespaille (1991:97) claims that the subject of the get -passive is often not a real patient but rather assigned a certain degree of agentivity or responsibility for what happens to him. That is also the reason why she and others maintain that inanimate subjects are rare with get -passives, namely because inanimate subjects are usually not compatible with the notion of responsibility. Hübler (1991:92-93) argues that the lexical meaning of get, namely to receive, already implies this focus on the subject: the subject receives an action coming to him.
The emotive aspect
Another characteristic usually attributed to the get -passive is its emotive aspect. Most scholars agree that a notion of adversity is typical of get -passives, whereas be -passives are usually used in neutral contexts. Hatcher (1949:437) observes that “the action undergone by the subject is of […] an undesirable nature”. Carter and McCarthy (1999:54) as well say that get -passives are mostly used to describe “adverse or problematic circumstances”. According to Biber et al. (1999:481) the verbs that can be used with the get -passive therefore often have negative connotations like “hit, left, stuck”. Mair’s study confirms this: verbs denoting adverse events occur with get -passives at a relatively high frequency, whereas neutral verbs are less likely to do so, and stative and cognitive verbs even seem to be incompatible with the get -passive (cf. Mair 2006:111-117).
Apart from the notion of adversity, there is another side to the emotive aspect: For instance Chappell (1980:434 ff.) states that get -passives are also used to express situations which are beneficial for the subject. Hübler (1991:95) subsumes both concepts, that of adversity and that of benefit, under the “notion of remarkability”.
The speaker’s attitude
Most scholars believe that the emotive aspect of the get -passive is not one that is objectively inherent to the situation, but rather one that is implied by the speaker. Thus, by using the get -passive, the speaker expresses his subjective, emotional opinion about what happens to the subject (cf. e.g. Hübler 1991:90), an event which he, as mentioned above, finds in some way ‘remarkable’, either in a positive or in a negative way. Chappell (1980:428) for example maintains that the speaker can convey a certain “disapproval of or contempt for the subject’s ineptitude or foolishness” by using the get -passive. Vanrespaille (1991:104) states that apart from the emotive aspect, also the subject’s agentivity and responsibility for what happens to him, expressed by the get -passive, are not objective facts but judgements imposed on the subject by the speaker.
3.3. The diachronic development of get-passives
Investigating the diachronic development of the get -passive, Mair (2006:111-117) found out that it came into use in the 19th century. In this period, it had a fairly specialized semantics, including the typical notions of colloquial style, adversity and subject responsibility. Therefore, virtually all subjects were animate. According to Mair, the 20th century saw a lessening of constraints: inanimate subjects became more frequent to some extent with get -passives. Nevertheless, the constraints are still present and be -passives are much more likely than get -passives to occur with inanimate subjects (cf. Mair 2006:111-117).
Mair also found that get -passives are still much more likely to occur in spoken language than in writing and that adversity is still one of their typical features, whereas stative or cognitive verbs are still largely incompatible. Nevertheless, some cognitive verbs and others which used to be unusual with get -passives can nowadays be found occurring with them.
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