Getting at GET in World Englishes by Elisabeth Bruckmaier

Author:Elisabeth Bruckmaier
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: De Gruyter
Published: 2017-03-07T16:00:00+00:00

The numbers in bold in the last column of Table 5.28 point to meaning concentrations of one or several GET-PVs across all corpora. Most frequently, GET is combined with a particle to express ‘to rise’ (78 tokens, tag “rise”), ‘to leave a situation, institution or phase’ (66 tokens, tag “leave”), ‘to enter a situation or phase’ (64 tokens, tag “enter”), ‘to cause sb to leave a situation, institution or phase or to obtain profit from a situation’ (64 tokens, tag “leave_cause”), ‘to cope with a situation’ (60 tokens, tag “cope”), ‘to continue or resume an action’ (56 tokens, tag “continue/resume”), ‘to manage to do sth’ (55 tokens, tag “manage”), ‘to start an action’ (50 tokens, tag “act/start”), and ‘to enter an institution or network’ (50 tokens, tag “network”).

The numbers in bold in the columns for the individual corpora indicate where a variety deviates from the overall distribution in absolute or relative token numbers. As noted above, idioms are most frequent in British English and less often found in the other two varieties. Moreover, the meanings ‘to start an action’ (tag “act/start”) and ‘to board’ (tag “board”) are underused in Jamaican English compared to British and Singaporean English, while the meaning ‘to talk to sb’ (tag “contact”) is overused in Jamaican English but rare in British English. The meanings ‘to enter an institution or network’ (tag “network”) and ‘to rise’ (tag “rise”) are firmly established in all three varieties but overused in Jamaican English. A use not well-established in ICE-SIN is that for describing an interest in an activity (tag “interest”), as in GET into reading, while meanings closer to the literal meaning of GET, viz. ‘to enter a situation or phase’ (tag “enter”) and ‘to cause sb to leave a situation, institution or phase’ (tag “leave_ cause”), are relatively overused in ICE-SIN. Another point to note is that British English is the variety that makes most use of further single meanings, both simple (tag “other”) and causative (tag “other_cause”), i.e. the range of meanings in ICE-GB surpasses that of the other corpora. These further meanings include ‘to take revenge’, ‘to buy sth’, ‘to borrow sth’, ‘to become excited’, ‘to support sb’, ‘to note sth’, and ‘to cause sb or sth to rise’.

In the above analysis, preferred semantic fields of GET-PVs and meanings well-established in all three varieties were pointed out. Furthermore, the analysis pinpointed a broader meaning spectrum of GET-PVs in British English, in line with the large range of combinations determined above. Hypothesis 6 can be confirmed. Moreover, in British English, GET-PVs are not only used more frequently as idioms, but the GET-PVs carry more metaphorical meanings overall, e.g. ‘to continue or resume an action’ (tag “continue/resume”), ‘to start an action’ (tag “act/start”), or ‘to become interested in sth’ (tag “interest”), whereas in the New Englishes, a relative overuse of meanings closer to the literal movement meaning of GET can be found, viz. ‘to rise’ (tag “rise”), ‘to enter a situation or phase’ (tag “enter”), ‘to cause sb to

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