Fraseologia do verbo get na língua inglesa: uma abordagem da Linguística de Corpus e da Gramática de Construções

Abstract

This research examines the uses of get in contexts where the verb is followed by nominal phrases and it aims at proposing a mapping of the constructions where this predicate may occur. The research adopts the methodological perspective of Corpus Linguistics (McENERY; HARDIE, 2012) for the selection and extraction of data of language in use from a corpus of American English (Corpus of Contemporary American English-COCA), and the theoretical framework adopts the perspective of Cognitive Construction Grammar (GOLDBERG, 1995; 2006), for the analysis and categorization of the data in constructions. More specifically, the constructional mapping referred to has the objective to describe the linguistic behavior of get in two levels of analysis, namely: (1) In the constructional level, by highlighting the main syntactic, semantic and pragmatic characteristics of the grammatical contexts in which the verb occurs and; (2) In the lexical level, by emphasizing and discussing the main phraseologisms headed by get. The study corpus is composed of 9.210 utterances extracted from COCA and it contains get in all of its possible morphological forms, that is, the search run in the corpus made use of the lemmatized form of the verb so as to generate distinct instantiations of get (get, gets, getting, got, gotten). As for the collocates, the method of search and selection of the nominal complements prioritized the 50 most frequent nouns to the right of get, also in their lemmatized forms, in order to guarantee a considerable semantic variability amongst the elements with which the verb under analysis collocates. The conclusions at which this study arrived confirm the polysemous behavior and the syntactic versatility of get (ISRAEL, 2004), by outlining 13 constructional contexts in which the verb is productive. Nevertheless, the quantitative analysis of the data shows the preference of get for the transitive construction, context in which the licensed central meaning is that of obtention. As for the behavior of get in the lexical level, the study corpus highlighted 74 phraseological units headed by get.

From Syntax to Phraseology

“…This has been extensively discussed in light of the productive conduit metaphor (Reddy, 1979). Also, the fixedness of the expressions above as attested in Rosa (2014) and the metaphorical reading of the Obl argument discussed in Hampe (2010) and Dancygier and Sweetser (2014) reinforce the phraseological and constructional status of the expressions in (45). Similar form-functional behavior was found in the other caused-motion phraseologisms with communication terms, as samples of the concordance lines show.…”

“…As the table above shows, with the exception of get one's hands on, get one's hands off and get one's hands around, all the other phraseologisms show a level of attraction of about 50%, which speaks in favor of their phraseological status. That is, the expressions analyzed in here do not seem to be simple instantiations of the schematic caused motion, but independent low-level phraseological constructions (Hampe, 2010;Rosa, 2014;Rosa and Tagnin, 2015;Xia, 2017).…”

“…This analysis is based on a subset of data comprising 1284 instances of causedmotion constructions headed by the predicate get in a universe of 2449 causative utterances extracted from COCA (Rosa, 2014;Rosa and Tagnin, 2015). The syntax search on COCA used the lemmatized form of get and determined a span of two positions to the right to search for the most frequent nominal collocates.…”

“…Total frequency of the construction in the corpus Exemplifying with the phraseologism get the message across, we would have that (267 * 100) / 292 = 91.43% 8 , that is, in 91.43% of the times the sequence ___ the message across appears in the corpus, it appears with the verb get occupying the verbal slot. In other words, get the message across is a phraseological unit given that it is the co-occurrence of two or more linguistic items that form a semantic unit and that shows frequency that is higher than expected by chance (Gries, 2008;Rosa, 2014). In Table 6 below the levels of attraction for phraseologisms with causedmotion readings are presented.…”

Take the plunge

“…Phraseologisms with get: a way into caused motions Rosa (2014) studied the form-functional properties of the verb get, commonly defi ned as a highly polysemous verb, and proposed a constructional mapping of such a predicate based on the types of argument structure constructions presented in Goldberg (1995). With the aid of corpus linguistics procedures, the study extracted a total of 2449 causative utterances containing analytical causatives of three types, described and exemplifi ed from (2) to ( 7) below, as well as a special type of causative -the caused-motion construction -that is exemplifi ed in ( 8) and ( 9).…”