Get-passives

Case alternations in Icelandic ‘get’-passives

“…Haegeman (1985) proposed that English get -passives as in (35b) were derived as unaccusative or anticausative variants of get -causatives such as (35a). Icelandic AGPs will be shown to support this analysis, but only when supplemented with the claim that English get -passives are ambiguous (Brownlow 2011, Reed 2011, Alexiadou 2012), so that (35b) is not the only way to derive an English get -passive.…”

“…This can be explained by the proposal of Alexiadou (2012), who, drawing on work by Fox & Grodzinsky (1998), Reed (2011) and others, proposes that English get -passives are ambiguous (see also Brownlow 2011). They have a causative structure which embeds a null PRO, as in (49a), and a verbal and adjectival passive as in (49b) and (49c), respectively 21 .…”

“…While sentences of the sort in (49a) can have an agentive interpretation of the overt subject, Alexiadou (2012) notes that ‘get’-passives of the sort in (49b) tend to be judged unacceptable with purpose clauses and agentive adverbials identifying the implicit external argument, as in (50a). Reed (2011) and Alexiadou (2012) propose that this is not because they lack an implicit external argument; rather, it is because the get of get -passives is an achievement verb, and achievement verbs tend to be incompatible with agentive adverbials and purpose clauses; see (50b) below. Given the right context, adverbs and purpose clauses are, in fact, possible with get -passives, as shown in (50c); the same goes for many achievement verbs, as in the example in (50d).…”

“…Sigurðsson 2012b:379 for related alternatives). When this structure is interpreted, v 0 introduces the eventive interpretation; following Reed (2011) and Alexiadou (2012), the relevant ‘flavor’ of v will be/yield a causative achievement verb. Appl 0 may introduce an applied θ-role, the interpretation of which is determined on the basis of the PassiveP complement.…”

Acquisition of French Causatives: Parallels to English Passives

“…Yet, while the native-speaker judgments indicated in 29and 30are the ones that are usually reported, there does exist some inter-speaker variation for the (c) examples. 12 Indeed, Reed (2011) and Alexiadou (2012) report that get-passives are sometimes judged to be fully compatible with a by-phrase, or with other diagnostics for the syntactic presence of an Agent, especially if contextual support is provided. According to Alexiadou's (2012) account, English actually has two different non-actional voice heads, corresponding to passive voice and middle voice, that are possible in a get-passive (in contrast, the be-passive always contains the 'passive' voice head).…”