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Article published In: Variation and Grammaticalization of Verbal Constructions
Edited by Dániel Czicza and Gabriele Diewald
[Constructions and Frames 14:1] 2022
► pp. 13–40

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On the development of permissive get

 | Université de Neuchâtel
 | University of Birmingham
Published online: 9 August 2022
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/cf.00056.hil
Abstract
This paper contributes to the study of grammaticalization phenomena from the perspective of Construction Grammar (Coussé, E., Andersson, P. & Olofsson, J. (Eds.) (2018). Grammaticalization meets Construction Grammar. John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). It is concerned with modal uses of the English verb get that express a permitted action, as in The prisoners always get to make one phone call. Different views exist on the contexts in which permissive get emerged. Gronemeyer (Gronemeyer, C. (1999). On deriving complex polysemy: The grammaticalization of get. English Language and Linguistics, 31, 1–39. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar: 30) suggests that the permissive meaning derives from causative uses (I got him to confess). An alternative is proposed by van der Auwera et al. (van der Auwera, J., Kehayov, P. & Vittrant, A. (2009). Acquisitive modals. In L. Hogeweg & H. de Hoop & A. Malchukov (Eds.), Cross-linguistic semantics of tense, aspect and modality (pp. 271–302). John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar: 283), who view permissive get as an extension of its acquisitive meaning (I got a present). We revisit these claims in the light of recent historical data from American English. Specifically, we searched the COHA (Davies, M. (2010). The Corpus of Historical American English (COHA): 400+ million words, 1810–2009. [URL]) for forms of get followed by to and a verb in the infinitive. Besides examples of permissive get, we retrieved examples of obligative got to (I got to leave), causative get (Who did you get to confess?), possessive got (What have I got to be ashamed of?), and a category that we label inchoative get (You’re getting to be a big girl now). Drawing on distributional semantic techniques ( (2016). Using distributional semantics to study syntactic productivity in diachrony: A case study. Linguistics, 54(1), 149–188. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, (2018). Recent change in the productivity and schematicity of the way-construction: A distributional semantic analysis. Corpus Linguistic and Linguistic Theory, 14(1), 65–97. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar), we analyse how permissive get and inchoative get developed semantically over time. Our results are consistent with an account that represents an alternative to both Gronemeyer, C. (1999). On deriving complex polysemy: The grammaticalization of get. English Language and Linguistics, 31, 1–39. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar and van der Auwera, J., Kehayov, P. & Vittrant, A. (2009). Acquisitive modals. In L. Hogeweg & H. de Hoop & A. Malchukov (Eds.), Cross-linguistic semantics of tense, aspect and modality (pp. 271–302). John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, namely the idea that permissive get evolved out of inchoative uses that invited the idea of a permission.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Previous work on permissive get, and a new proposal
    • 2.1The causative-to-permissive pathway
    • 2.2The acquisitive-to-permissive pathway
    • 2.3The inchoative-to-permissive pathway
  • 3.Data and methods
    • 3.1Corpus data
    • 3.2Distributional semantics
  • 4.Results and discussion
  • 5.Concluding remarks
  • References
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