The use of inanimate subjects with the get-passive: A WebCorp study

Many families speak English at home and it is one of the first languages learnt by about half of the current pre-school children. Nearly everyone in Singapore speaks more than one language, with many people speaking three or four. Most children grow up bilingual from infancy and learn more languages as they grow up.

Naturally the presence of other languages especially various varieties of Malay and of Chinese has influenced the English of Singapore. The first group consists of those who have English as the primary medium of instruction in school from an early age to a high level. The second group consists of children who have acquired English at home from birth.

At the very first beginning of the main part of the paper, as we have already mentioned above, we will give the definitions of the following terms. We will define the most central word, namely the term of corpus, as well as the different kinds of corpora that exist, something that will consequently lead us to the description and definition of the corpora that are used in this particular case.

Despite the fact that there are many discussions on how a linguistic corpus should be defined, mainly crucially depending on how broadly one wishes to define it, we will give a rather restricted definition of a corpus cf. For the purposes of this term- paper then,.

One can easily distinguish several different types of electronic corpora. We can also distinguish between written and spoken corpora cf. The first computer corpus that was compiled for linguistic research was the Brown Corpus. The Brown Corpus, which was created in , consists of one million words of edited written American English and is divided into 2, word samples from various genres [e.

After the Brown corpus, another one was modeled, and intended to be its British English counterpart. These four corpora have already been used in the past for numerous researches concerning various linguistic issues, including the study of the English get - passive. Therefore, I will only present the overall frequencies resulting from studies being already conducted with the help of those corpora and I will try to compare those findings to the ones, which will be revealed later on from the research on the Singapore Corpus.

Definition of the Get - passive 5. Introduction First of all, and before I proceed with the actual description and basic layout of my term paper, it would be quite interesting to quote the thesis that roused by interest and became my first motivation concerning the study of a certain grammatical phenomenon in Singaporean English. History of Singapore By the time that Sir Stamford Raffles claimed the island of Singapore, a trading post at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, for the East India Company in , begins the history of modern Singapore.

Corpora used At the very first beginning of the main part of the paper, as we have already mentioned above, we will give the definitions of the following terms. For the purposes of this term- paper then, a corpus will be considered a collection of texts or parts of texts upon which some general linguistic analysis can be conducted.

In recent times, a corpus has come to be regarded as a body of text made available in computer- readable form for purposes of linguistic analysis Meyer A Corpus-based Study in American English. The use of inanimate subjects with the get-passive: Singaporean Culture and the Meaning of Money.

A corpus-based study on adjective use in 16th century prayers and letters. Corpus-based analysis of the partial synonyms "oppress, repress, suppress" with regard to their contextual usage. What can corpus-based approaches tell about New Englishes? Politeness in English and German: This paper is concerned with the use of the internet in linguistic research.

The phenomenon under investigation is the get -passive. In a first step, I will outline reasons for and problems with using the web as a linguistic corpus. The next step will be the description and analysis of the WebCorp study on get -passives as opposed to be -passives.

In this way, I hope to be able to show whether the constraints traditionally attributed to get -passives, in particular animacy of the subject, are still in force, or in how far they are lessening, possibly making the get -passive an equivalent contestant to the be -passive. Differences between British and American English will be examined in order to find out whether either variant is more advanced. Using the web as a linguistic corpus is a fairly new and popular method in linguistic research. The reasons for its attractiveness are obvious: First and foremost, the internet is a huge corpus covering all imaginable text types, which means that it can be used for studying linguistic phenomena which are too infrequent to be found in smaller, traditional corpora, such as the get -passive.

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Moreover, the web is freely available. This is a big advantage over traditional corpora, which are expensive and time-consuming to build and update cf. Another important aspect is the fact that the internet is very much up-to-date: New websites are created every day, so that newly-emerging linguistic phenomena will show much earlier on the web than in any traditional corpus.

Furthermore, the internet provides a huge amount of authentic language data cf. Nevertheless, using the web as a linguistic corpus has several disadvantages as well which have to be mentioned. We do not know what exactly we are looking at when studying web data cf.

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Most pages on the internet are written in English, but probably more than half of the internet users are non-native speakers of English; therefore there are probably many websites in English that are written by non-native speakers cf. Another essential disadvantage of the web is that data are not replicable: As new pages are created every day and others deleted, the same research will never yield the same results at different points in time cf. A major problem in using search engines is that they are not designed for linguistic purposes but for commercial ones cf. That is why it is not possible to search directly for grammatical phenomena such as the get -passive, which is an important limitation to the present study.

Searches are always confined to lexical items or collocations, even when using the linguistic tool WebCorp, as it is also dependent on the commercial search engines. In fact, we do not even know how search engines like Google work, i.

The use of inanimate subjects with the get-passive: A WebCorp study

Moreover, these criteria change regularly so that we can never really know what type of data we are looking at. Another problem arises when studying linguistic change: Moreover, dates of publication for websites are often unknown, so that diachronic studies using the internet alone are hardly possible. It is important to keep in mind all these disadvantages of the web as a linguistic corpus in order to be able to find meaningful results.

• Get-passive in Singaporean English - A corpus-based study.
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Nevertheless, there is considerable debate on whether it is a true passive or only a structurally similar form with a passive-like meaning, an opinion which is favoured by Hundt First of all, get is not a real auxiliary like be cf. The form also subsumes idiomatic constructions like get lost or get rid of , which do not have active analogues.

Get-passive in Singaporean English - A corpus-based study

Also inchoative phrases like get dressed or get married cannot be considered passives, because they have a middle semantics and get is rather a resulting copula than a passive auxiliary cf. According to most grammars of English, one of the main characteristics of the get -passive is its colloquial nature. The be -passive, in contrast, is said to be the more neutral variant. There is also consent about the fact that get -passives focus more than be -passives on the subject of an action. That is also the reason why she and others maintain that inanimate subjects are rare with get -passives, namely because inanimate subjects are usually not compatible with the notion of responsibility.

Another characteristic usually attributed to the get -passive is its emotive aspect. Most scholars agree that a notion of adversity is typical of get -passives, whereas be -passives are usually used in neutral contexts. Carter and McCarthy According to Biber et al. Apart from the notion of adversity, there is another side to the emotive aspect: For instance Chappell Most scholars believe that the emotive aspect of the get -passive is not one that is objectively inherent to the situation, but rather one that is implied by the speaker.

Thus, by using the get -passive, the speaker expresses his subjective, emotional opinion about what happens to the subject cf. Investigating the diachronic development of the get -passive, Mair In this period, it had a fairly specialized semantics, including the typical notions of colloquial style, adversity and subject responsibility.

Therefore, virtually all subjects were animate. According to Mair, the 20th century saw a lessening of constraints: Nevertheless, the constraints are still present and be -passives are much more likely than get -passives to occur with inanimate subjects cf. Mair also found that get -passives are still much more likely to occur in spoken language than in writing and that adversity is still one of their typical features, whereas stative or cognitive verbs are still largely incompatible.

Nevertheless, some cognitive verbs and others which used to be unusual with get -passives can nowadays be found occurring with them.