Volume 50, Issue 6

This article aims at offering a novel account of the similarities and differences between get-passives and their be-counterparts. It is shown that get-passives are ambiguous between a passive and an anticausative interpretation. Next, get-passives are compared to anticausatives and dispositional middles, as they seem to share some properties with these two structures. An analysis is offered, according to which get-passives, as well as anticausatives and dispositional middles, but not be-passives, realize Middle Voice. Specifically, get-passives realize the medio-passive interpretation of Middle Voice. Middle Voice is defined as a nonactive Voice, distinct from the passive. These two nonactive Voices involve two distinct syntactic Voice heads that generate middle and passive clauses respectively. Only the middle Voice head can be crosslinguistically interpreted as anticausative, and dipositional middle, but this interpretation is distinct from the passive one.

In this paper we explore from a synchronic perspective the GET construction of Modern Irish and the GET construction in the contact language Irish English. These productive GET constructions have two core senses (‘HAVE’ and ‘BECOME’). There are no morphosyntactic indicators to identify either sense yet a language user of Irish or Irish English will have no difficulty unpacking the correct meaning. There is a constructional indicator. One sense is that of a simple recipient construction (non-passive) whereas the other is more passive-like in that the subject=undergoer of the construction undergoes a change of state. A result state is an outcome of the verbal action but it is not always expressed with a resultative adjective. The state is elaborated by the second argument of the verb. In functional models of grammar we expect the verb to project an argument structure and reflect an associated semantics based on the verb's lexical entry but we provide instances where a constructional perspective seems best to explain the behavior of this particular GET verb and its meaning in a clausal construction. We claim that the GET construction of Irish English and the GET construction of Modern Irish are related within a synchronic perspective, reflecting a unique cognitive perspective on bilingual lexicon architecture and the role of constructions. We provide an account of both language constructions and argue that a characterization grounded within functional account (Van Valin 2005) with a robust lexical constructional perspective (Goldberg 1995; Michaelis 2006; Van Valin 2005; Nolan 2011c), that mediates the relationship between lexicon and construction, best explains the relationship between these constructions across the two languages.

The German “ bekommen -passive” is a recipient passive construction that is generally considered to be a case of “grammaticalization-in-progress”. It emerges on the basis of constructional ambiguity: In a bracket structure with a finite form of the verbs bekommen or kriegen (‘to get’, ‘to receive’) and a past participle in sentence-final position, the get-verb can be reanalyzed as a passive auxiliary, when certain structural and semantic conditions are met. The new recipient passive construction is very productive, and its use is even extended to two-place verbs, where a very abstract notion of benefaction or malefaction is possible. The article will analyze the structural and semantic properties of the construction in a range of data and in correlation with the ongoing grammaticalization process of the construction. Also, the particular structural features of German that serve as a starting point for the reanalysis of this construction will be described. The semantics of the construction will be described on the basis of semantic classes of ditransitive structures, as suggested by Leirbukt 1997 and Goldberg 1995. It will be argued that there is a potentially wide-ranging semantic productivity with a construction, once it is established. Descriptions in terms of a form-function correlation are useful to capture a certain tendency in the meaning, but they should not exclude some potential flexibility with respect to the situation of use. The motivation for the development of the German bekommen -passive will be outlined with respect to findings and considerations from functional syntactic theories. Evidence from two corpus studies will be discussed to show that the general syntactic-pragmatic principle, that topics tend to become subjects cross-linguistically, motivates the emergence and distribution of the bekommen -passive construction.

This article will argue that the typology of verbs currently assumed in generative grammar has an incidental gap; we would expect that besides dyadic verbs with two internal arguments, in which the theme argument surfaces as subject, there are also dyadic verbs with two internal arguments, in which the goal argument surfaces as subject. We will show that such verbs do indeed exist and are instantiated by the verb krijgen ‘to get’ and its cognates hebben and houden ‘to keep’. We will call these verbs undative verbs given that they are characterized by the fact that they can assign accusative, but not dative case. We will further provide a discussion of the syntactic behavior of the krijgen -passive and what we will call the semicopular construction in (so-called standard and nonstandard) Dutch in order to show that these case properties of the main verbs krijgen , hebben and houden are also present in their uses as auxiliary and semicopular verbs.

I propose a variant of the hypothesis that expressions often formalized with the inchoative operator become are really causative constructions without Causers. I test the claims in a detailed semantic and syntactic analysis of most uses of English get . This verb is of interest because, in most of its uses, it can be analyzed as a spellout of become ( cause [−agentive] in my system), sometimes enriched with other (e.g., possessive, agentive, benefactive) predications. Claims include (i) that agentive structures like I got ready involve morphologically unmarked reflexivization/middle voice, (ii) that the semantic compositionality of get -passives has been underestimated, (iii) that get sheds important light on the nature of directional PPs, (iv) that ditransitive get enriches our understanding of English double object constructions, (v) that voice heads may or may not introduce a Causer argument predetermined by the embedded predicate, (vi) that become and cause -type verbs can impose arbitrary selection restrictions on the secondary predicates with which they appear. The semantic analyses are expressed in abstract syntax, but can be translated into other frameworks.

The present survey of the uses of the Norwegian verb få ‘get’ is based on its converse relationship to the three-place achievement predicate gi ‘give’, which combines with an agentive subject, a recipient indirect object and a direct object. The syntactic constructions in which få appears and their relative frequency of occurrence are described on the basis of a corpus consisting of 779 examples from works of present-day Norwegian fictional and nonfictional prose. About 60% of the examples have NP or PP arguments only and about 40% show, in addition or only, a nonfinite verb form. The former group of constructions comprises numerous examples representing syntactically complex lexical predicates. The latter group consists of four different construction types that show grammaticalization features: causative with an infinitive with the marker å ( å -infinitive); modal with the bare infinitive; “recipient passive” with a passive past participle; and “resultative active” with an active past participle. In addition, there is an “infinitival relative” construction where an å -infinitive is adjoined to the object of få . These various types of constructions are investigated with regard to the extent to which the arguments of få reflect or deviate from the semantic properties of gi in the basic use of this verb as a three-place achievement predicate.

The Irish verb faigh ‘get, find’ displays a range of colloquial uses that resemble in part the polysemy of English get; accordingly, they are commonly assumed to be the result of English influence, despite almost no study of the verb's history. However, caution is called for in assuming transfer whenever nonstandard forms show similarities between the two languages, as recent research on Irish English suggests. Scholars of the English dialects in Ireland have shown that features previously assumed to result from contact with Irish can be attributed at least in part to other causes. Similar questions should be raised for changes in Irish. This paper examines several use patterns of faigh in contemporary Irish, and traces the history of their development from the early modern Irish period, to establish both the plausibility of English influence and the possibility of language internal mechanisms in the development of the new meanings.

This paper presents an overview of the history and usage of the Estonian verb saama ‘to get’. We take the grammaticalization approach which posits that, diachronically, the language unit undergoing grammaticalization becomes more and more abstract, both semantically and functionally. Here we present the grammaticalization story of what was originally a motion verb, which becomes a modal and future auxiliary through various transitional stages. Among the lexical meanings of the verb saama , succeed , possess , and become are the most important in modern Estonian. Among the grammatical functions, the modal uses stand out: the auxiliary verb saama together with the da -infinitive ( inf1 ) of the main verb are used in constructions expressing both participant-internal and participant-external possibility and necessity as well as in epistemic constructions. Furthermore, the present article addresses the resultative-passive constructions of saama with the active past participle ( app /- nud ) and passive past participle ( ppp /- tud ). We present the process of grammatical replication that took place during the period of older Estonian (16th to 19th century) under the influence of German as a contact language. In the translations of religious texts from this period, the verb saama was introduced into written Estonian as a fully grammaticalized auxiliary verb expressing future .

The present paper presents a study of the meaning potential of the Swedish verb få ‘get’ in a contrastive perspective. The meaning potential represents the total set of senses of a word and their relationships. The verb få has a complex pattern of polysemy and grammaticalization including lexical as well as modal, aspectual and causative grammatical meanings and the interpretation of få in text is based on syntactic, lexical semantic and pragmatic cues. The total set of meanings form a very language-specific pattern. Data consist of close to 1 000 occurrences of få in a multilingual parallel corpus consisting of extracts from 10 Swedish original novels and their translations into English, German, French and Finnish. If the meaning ‘come to possess (something concrete)’ is regarded as the prototypical meaning, få has rather direct equivalents in English get , German bekommen and kriegen and Finnish saada , whereas French lacks a clear equivalent already in this sense. With respect to most of the other senses (or uses), the meaning potential of få is more or less unique in relation to the other languages except for Finnish saada . The major aim of the present paper is to describe how unique meaning patterns can be expressed in other languages. A study of the translation patterns reveals extensive use of syntactic restructuring to render certain meanings or the use of verbs with very different meaning potentials which overlap only partly with that of få . The latter applies in particular to the modal meanings and the very language-specific combination of the seemingly contradictory meanings permission and obligation. Not only are verbs with other basic meanings than ‘get, come to possess’ used as translations in the other languages but distinctions between modal meanings are drawn in different ways. The results of the contrastive study are briefly discussed also within a typological framework.