Is the get-passive adversative?

Paper in Linguistics

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Is the get‐passive adversative? Hilary Chappell To cite this article: Hilary Chappell (1980) Is the get‐passive adversative?, Paper in Linguistics, 13:3, 411-452, DOI: 10.1080/08351818009370504 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08351818009370504

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Papers in Linguistics: International Journal of Human Communication 13 (3) 1980.

IS THE GET-PASSIVE ADVERSATIVE? HILARY CHAPPELL Australian National University

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ABSTRACT A new analysis of the get-passive is advocated in the following paper. It is based on the belief that the study of semantics is fundamental and prior to the study of syntax. This initial assumption leads to the postulation of a discrete number of intuitively-verifiable interpretations of the get-passive construction in the main section of the article. Natural language is used as the semantic metalanguage in the analysis of the passive. Bach interpretation is subsequently reduced into less complex but more readily comprehensible units. The article begins with an outline of earlier attitudes towards the use of get, followed by a brief description of several different kinds of passive constructions in other languages. An appraisal of two comparatively recent articles that specifically deal with the get-passive precedes the presentation of the semantic analysis.

In English, the use of the gei-passive has remained relatively unanalysed. In the past, grammarians have tended to view the choice oí get as the passive auxiliary, rather than foe, as only causing a negligible difference in meaning. On the other hand, the multifarious uses oí get have long been a contentious point of discussion in traditional grammar books and handbooks of style. In the earlier approaches, predominantly during the 19th and early 20th centuries, get was generally condemned as vulgar and colloquial. Later grammarians such as Jespersen and Gurme, in opposition to these prescriptive (and proscriptive) tendencies, characte© Linguistic Research Inc. 1980

0031-1251/80/03 411-452

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Hilary Chappell

rized the difference between the passive constructions having either get or be as their auxiliaries, as one of a dynamic-stative contrast, although they continued to regard get as an 'expressive colloquialism' whenever it wasn't necessary to disambiguate an adjective from the past participle of the passive. (Jespersen,1949,p.lO9; Curme,1931, 445-46) Jespersen provides the following example where get is able to distinguish 'state' from 'transition':


"At that time he was not married. He got married in 1920." (p. 108) (where, presumably, 'married' is an adjective in the first instance, but a past participle in the second) - yet, such a description gives us only a glimpse of the underlying semantics of the get-passive. Despite this lone observation concerning the active-stative contrast between get and be, most descriptions of the passive remain based on an underlying assumption that the two constructions are formally identical from the point of view of syntax, and thus, the choice of auxiliary is considered arbitrary. It is this view which hindered the search for the semantic properties that differentiate the ge^passive from the ¿¿e-passive. On the other hand, when data is examined from other languages, we find the use of alternative passive markers or passive constructions does, in fact, signal semantic differences. In recent studies of Asian languages, several analyses have singled out a certain kind of passive construction which grammatically codifies the notion of adversity or misfortune, in contradistinction to neutral or other types of passives. A well-known example is the Vietnamese adversative passive, which uses a special morphological exponent, ¿>/, to encode this feature. Compare the following related active and passive sentences: (cited in Clark,1974b,94-95: her num-

Is the Get-Passive Adversative?

413

bers) 10.


11.

ong giet ho man kill they 'They killed him. A bi ay ong man that Pass. (He underwent adversely: 'He was killed.'

ay that

(ho)

gtet kill (th'ey) They kill him.)

Even when the active form describes a desirable state of affairs, the corresponding passive with bi can only depict the contrary situation: (example taken from Keenan,1978,p.2O: his numbers) 21.

a. Bao thuong Quang Bao love Quang 'Bao loves Quang.' c. Quang bi Bao thuong Quang Pass. Bao love 'Quang is loved by Bao.' (ironic: she is loved by Bao despite her wishes)

From this kind of data, it is possible to conclude that the adversative connotation of the bi passive in Vietnamese is not determined by the meaning of the verb, but rather by the meaning of the syntactic construction taken as a whole. Moreover, in contrast to the other Asian languages whose adversative passive constructions have been described (such as those in Japanese, Thai, Lao, Cambodian and Mandarin Chinese), Vietnamese also has a passive of good fortune, formed with the submissive verb duoci (Keenan, p. 20)

414

Hilary Chappell b. Quang duoc Bao thuong Quang Pass. Bao love 'Quang is loved by Bao.' (beneficial for Quang)


In contradistinction to this choice between a beneficial or an adversative passive in Vietnamese, Mandarin Chinese has a choice between an adversative or a neutral passive with the passive markers bei and rang respectively: 1. a Zhang San de nieimei ai ta ai de budeliao Zhang San's sister love him love extremely "Zhang San's little sister loves him very much." b. ? Zhang San bei ta de meimei aide budeliao Zhang San Pass, his sister love extremely ?'Zhang San is loved by his little sister.' (he is negatively affected by it) c. Zhang San rang ta de meimei ai de budeliao Zhang San Pass. his sister love extremely 'Zhang San is loved by his little sister.'(neutral) The following examples show that the passive with rang is neutral with regard to the positive or negative nature of an event or state of affairs for the subject, since it forms passives of desirable or undesirable situations with equal facility, unlike the passive marker bei: V

_ y*

s

2. a. Ta da le Li Si yî dun he hit Aspect Li Si one beating 'He beat up Li Si.' b. Li Si bei ta da le y i dun Li Si Pass, he hit Aspect one beating 'Li Si was beaten up by him.' (he was negatively affected by it)


415

c. Li Sz mn^ ta da Ae yi dun Li Si Pass, he hit Aspect one beating 'Li Si was beaten up by him.' (neutral)


In contrast to the adversative passive of Asian languages, (possibly an areal feature of this region), another kind of passive has been described in Modern Greek, which conveys the subject's causal involvement in the event; excluding reference to specific agents: (examples from Warburton,1975,p.563) 3. a. o janis shot o se to niko Nom. John kill Ace. Nick 'John killed Nick.' b. o ; nikos skotothike apo tus exthrus Nöm. Nick kill-Pass^ by the enemy 'Nick got (himself) killed and the source or cause of his death was the enemy.' c. ??o nikos skotothike apo to jani Nom. Nick kill-Pass. by John In Modern Greek, the only way that 'Nick' can be encoded as the theme (or topic) but, at the same time, the semantic 'patient' of the event, including reference to a specific agent, is by means of a patient-focus construction which has the normal active verb morphology. However, it requires a different word order from the active sentence construction as well as the obligatory presence of the verbal enclitic, indicating that 'Nick' is grammatically the direct object. Moreover, there is no im plication of causal involvement on the par£ of 'Nick'. d. to niko Ace. Nick

ton skotose Ace. kill enclitic 'Nick was killed by John.'

o janis Nom. John

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Hilary Chappell


These examples from three languages, both related to and genetically-distinct from English, reveal several important dimensions along which passives vary, not only within the one language but also cross-linguistically. In the next section, I will show that such semantic parameters are also crucial in distinguishing the get-passive from the fee-passive in English. Despite the traditional view that censured the use of get as 'inelegant' and 'colloquial5, it persisted in its function as an alternative auxiliary to fee, and became increasingly popular in use. (Visser, 1969,p.2O31) Nevertheless, this was the dominant trend in analysis until the appearance of Anna Granville Hatcher's article in 1949, entitled 'To Be/Get Invited", a detailed though-be-it non-formal examination of the semantics of the get-passive construction. She effectively argues against the traditional description of the get -passive as merely the colloquial alternative to the fee-passive with hard evidence of many cases where get cannot be substituted for fee, concluding with the remarks "the use of get as a passive auxiliary is greatly limited". (p.435) Even more significant is Hatcher's view that "get" will be used for only two types of events - those felt as having either fortunate or unfortunate consequences for the subject", (p.441) Her article shows in a convincing manner that the fee and gef-passives must have different semantic structures. Robin Lakoff has similarly noted this polarization of the #rf-passive in her 1971 article "Passive Resistance": "The ¿e ¿-passive in English, unlike the fee-passive, is frequently used to reflect the attitude of the speaker toward the events described in the sentence: whether he feels they are good or bad, or reflect well or poorly on him ..."(p.154) In addition to this, both writers have independently reached the conclusion that the #e/-passive conveys the notion of'responsibility' on the part of the subject (similar to the passive in Greek), which Lakotf also characterizes elsewhere as the "active involve-


417


ment" of the subject in the event. (Lakoff, p.151; Hat cher ,p .43 7) In the get-passive, then, the subject is thought of as having more control in determining the resulting situation than for the corresponding foe-passive where the subject is purely an undergoer. Although Hatcher provides very clear-cut examples to prove her point about the restrictions on the use of get, her evidence is not conclusive for either the 'responsibility' factor or for the dichotomization of events into fortunate and unfortunate. In the end, she gives a diachronic explanation of the development of get as a passive auxiliary rather than formalizing the semantic properties of get which she skilfully singled out in the main body of her article. The situation is similar for Lakoff's article: She concludes that the getpassive has a different semantic structure from the fee-passive without, however, proposing one. Subsequent to these two thought-provoking articles by Hatcher and Lakoff, Marybeth Clark tentatively suggested that get functions like the submissive verbs in the adversative passives of Asian languages. (This proposal was independent of reference to the two earlier analyses.) (1974b, 104-5) This only serves to enlarge the area of tantalizingly unresolved questions concerning the nature of theêfpassive. Is the êi-passive adversative, then? The following semantic analysis will show that such a characterization only constitutes part of the answer. In fact, the êf-passive can be divided into several related constructions, which although formally-identical from the point of view of syntax, differ conceptually. Furthermore, only some of these get-passive are adversative', others codify the beneficial nature of the passive event for the subject (foreshadowed by the evidence and remarks of earlier investigators). In this article, I want to proceed one step further in the dif-

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Hilary Chappell

ferentiation of the ge¿-passive from the foe-passive by undertaking a semantic analysis of the get -passive which will result in the formalization of its semantic properties. Ideally, a thorough analysis of the semantics of the ^¿-passive would include an analysis of all the ge¿-constructions in English, related through their sharing of certain semantic components. For example, what is the relationship of the ge ¿-passive: Jane got invited,


to the causative use of get: Jane got her friend to invite Mary, as well as to the passivized causative: Jane got Mary invited, and even its relationship to the simple gei-construction? : Jane got an invitation. Such questions cannot be confined, however, to the space of one short article, so I will concentrate here solely on the gef-passive. In the formal analysis, I will use a non-arbitrary semantic metalanguage, consisting of primitive concepts such as want, think of and say y and in so doing, avoid the use of invented symbols and markers. The semantic metalanguage is systematically applied in the reductive paraphrase of each related syntactic construction belonging to the ge¿-passive. I will only employ ad hoc terms such as 'adversative' and 'beneficial' in the role of abbreviatory labels for these constructions. As noted above, other writers have, in fact, used vague


419


terms such as 'responsibility' and 'emotional involvement' to explicate certain semantic components grammaticalized by the get-çassive with the drawback that they prove confusing whenever it is not clear from which context their use has been temporarily borrowed for the purposes of linguistic description. In contradistinction to this, I propose that the kind of semantic representation used in this article for the purposes of formalization is the most fully adequate means of explicating each particular component of meaning in a precise and exact manner. At best, informal terms can only vaguely allude to these features. The advantage of an analysis in terms of natural language is that the results are open to immediate verification - they are intuitively testable. Moreover, the consistent use of simple and intelligible concepts like do and want in this formalization enables each semantic representation to be compared systematically to reveal their structural relationships. On the contrary, an artificial metalanguage needs to be learnt before an interpretation as opposed to an explicit display of the semantic structure is possible. This analytic procedure constitutes one step towards an ultimate explication of the meaning, formulated entirely in terms of a small set of semantic indefinables which are hypothesized to exist in every language. The particular framework of analysis used in this article is based on the work of Anna Wierzbicka in the field of natural semantics, especially in regard to the methodology used in her most recent articles arguing for a semantically-based syntax. The constructions I wish to analyse have either this form: Np

got

Vrjy..ed.

Jane

got

fired /promoted.

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Hilary Chappell

or this form: Np

got

Jane

got

+

reflexive pronoun herself

V^ r ...ed. fired /promoted.

with incidental remarks on the related constructions where an inanimate noun is the subject of the get -passive: N

P' S


Jane's where

N

IN

8ot

V Tr ...ed.

bike

got

stolen/fixed.

Np

= = =

personal noun inanimate noun transitive verb

At this point, I will make some general observations about the get-passive, while pointing out which ¿^-constructions are being excluded from the analysis. The ^cf-passive has a two-argument semantic structure: An external agent is either implied or explicitly expressed in the structure by means of an agentive íry-phrase: Jane got fired by the director. Initially, I will propose this semantic representation for the passive: Something happened to Jane (X) because someone else (the director) (Y) did something where the semantic component "Something happened to Jane" is


421

used to show the change of state that occurs, which can be stated informally as "Something different can be said about Jane", i.e. "Jane no longer had that job after that." That a second person's actions are crucial to the meaning of the ge¿-passive is verified by an additional piece of evidence: Stative verbs such as those of emotion and thought are not compatible with it, unless they are conceived of as verbs of action in the particular context: (4)

a. Jane