| Summary: | This study investigates the get-passive in American English, with emphasis on its distribution
in different text types and its semantic features characterized by co-occurring verbs. The data
was drawn from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), i.e. the latest version
with eight different genres. The findings indicate that the get-passive is a linguistic feature of
informal English due to its highest frequency in spoken genres, e.g. TV and movie subtitles,
and blogs. Furthermore, common verbs constituting the get-passive were explored and their
meanings in context were analyzed. In agreement with previous studies, the semantic analysis
of get-passives revealed a higher proportion of verbs expressing adversity, followed by those
with positive and neutral meanings, respectively. The existence of non-adversative get-passive
predicts a decline in the adversative type.
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