The get-passive in Tyneside English

Abstract

This paper provides a quantitative variationist analysis of the distribution of get- versus be-passives in spoken Tyneside English. Taking data from the Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (1960s to 2010), the paper uses mixed-effects modelling to examine a wide range of possible constraints on the distribution of get versus be, some of which have been discussed at length in the literature on the get-passive (e.g. subject animacy, adversative semantics) and some of which have received less attention (e.g. grammatical person, tense, aspectuality). It demonstrates that the use of the get-passive is determined by a complex combination of semantic and syntactic factors (subject animacy, telicity, non-neutral semantics, tense and grammatical person). Moreover, it argues that, despite the dramatic rise in frequency of get-passives over time (with younger speakers using them even more frequently than be-passives), most of the constraints remain in place and the variant is pragmatically marked. This stands in sharp contrast to the findings of recent investigations into the grammaticalization of get-passives in standard British and American English, which found that increased frequency in those varieties was also accompanied by semantic bleaching and generalization.