Diachrony and Synchrony in English Corpus Linguistics by Alcaraz-Sintes Alejandro. Valera-Hernández Salvador

Author:Alcaraz-Sintes, Alejandro.,Valera-Hernández, Salvador.
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Peter Lang AG

An overwhelming majority of get-passives occur without an agent, and a possible explanation for this is that, since some measure of responsibility for initiating the action is ascribed to the subject-referent in get-passives, the role of the subject-referent in the process is of greater concern than that of the agent, which might have low infor ← 208 | 209 → mation value, for instance, when it is obvious, pragmatically inferable, unknown or irrelevant (cf. also Palmer 1988: 78–79). These factors lead Collins (1996: 46) to specify a scale, going from cases where the agent, though unexpressed, is salient in the linguistic context, as in The young girl got hit by a truck and got killed where the agent-phrase by a truck is readily reconstructible, or in The carpet’s loose there and my heel got caught (from Collins 1996: 45) where by the (loose) carpet is easily inferable from the linguistic context, to cases where the agent is merely implicit and might be figured out without complete certainty, as in We cut the amount of wood the boss required, without getting caught cutting without a licence (from Collins 1996: 45), in which we might infer, in part from the rest of the sentence and in part from general knowledge, that the indefinite and non-specific agent is human and has some authority, for example, the police.

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