ФАКТОРЫ, ОБУСЛОВЛИВАЮЩИЕ ВЫБОР GET-ПАССИВОВ В АНГЛИЙСКОМ ЯЗЫКЕ: КОРПУСНОЕ ИССЛЕДОВАНИЕ

This paper is part of the ongoing research project concerning the syntax of passive construction in English. Passive construction is notorious in both linguistics and education for its complex structures, varied meanings and implications, and the presence of numerous comparable constructions. To tackle these challenges, the purpose of this project is twofold. First, it contributes to a comparative study of the passive construction in English, Japanese, and other languages. Second, it contributes to pedagogy. To reach these aims, this paper uses a variationist framework to analyze a corpus of English passives. It also extends to descriptive and generative frameworks. The present study analyzes the English passives, specifically be-passives and get-passives, in Quebec, Canada, to identify the conditioning factors influencing their selection. The tokens of the passive sentences are examined in terms of their relations to age, sex, and social classes, as well as syntactic properties (e.g., agentivity). It is proposed that the choice of get-passives is affected by three independent factors: age, the presence or absence of a by-phrase, and the types of verbs used and how they are subcategorized and dynamic. Even though the corpus used in this study is fairly small, it contributes to the field by looking at a type of passive construction that has not been looked at much from different theoretical and descriptive angles. It also makes suggestions about how to do the research and what these findings mean for the form-meaning interface.