Passive sentences with get (like "he got shot") are more common now and are changing
What is it about?
Passive sentences with "get" instead of "be" (like "he got shot" instead of "he was shot") are becoming more and more frequent in written American English. These get-passives are still not nearly as common as passive sentences with be, but they are beginning to change such that their use is more similar to be-passives. This study uses corpus data to explore these recent developments in the use of the get-passive, which are interpreted in light of grammaticalization.
Why is it important?
The change observed in the study is in the situation types (a kind of temporal semantics that goes beyond tense and aspect) that get-passives have been used in over time. The study is the first that I am aware of that tracks the situation type of get-passives, and shows how changing situation type shows continued spread of get-passives to new linguistic contexts in the process of grammaticalization. The study also offers a replicable means of classifying corpus linguistic data by situation type, which may be fruitful in studies of other grammatical constructions as well.