The get-passive at the intersection of get and the passive

On the surface, the English get-passive looks just like a be-passive, with a form of get replacing the auxiliary be, resulting in a more informal passive construction. However, the meaning of the get-passive has been described as different from the meaning of the be-passive in a manner that goes beyond just stylistics. This paper examines claims that have been made about the differences between the English get-passive and the canonical be-passive on the basis of corpus-based data, specifically the secondary agent or responsibility reading of the subject, the adversity reading ascribed to the construction, and the presence or absence of an implicit argument. Corpus-based data show that the get-passive is not as uniformly different from the be-passive as is often claimed, which either means that flexibility must be built into the construction or that there are two structurally different get-passives.