A Corpus-Based Study of Get-Passive and Semantic Prosody in Spoken English

บทคัดย่อ

The construction of passive voice has always received a lot of attention among linguists of English research in the world. In contrast to be-passive, get-passive studies in naturally occurring language are still rarely seen. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the use of get-passive in spoken English when compared to other registers by using corpus linguistics. In addition, the co-occurring words and semantic prosodies of get-passive were also examined. The data of this study was drawn from Corpus of Contemporary American English or COCA, which is the most widely used corpus of the English language. The results revealed that the get-passive was highly used in TV and movie subtitles, blogs, spoken language, web pages, fiction, magazines, newspapers, and academic texts, respectively. It was also found that the word ‘caught’ mostly co-occurred with get-passive. Furthermore, the semantic analysis of get-passive co-occurring words showed various verbs expressing negative meanings, followed by positive, and neutral, respectively. The findings of the study would help English language learners get a clear picture of how get-passive construction is used in real world contexts. The results of the present study would be useful in terms of the instruction of English lexico-grammatical patterns because the corpus analysis provides more information about the authentic use of get-passive in English speaking as an alternative to traditional be-passive construction. This study also addresses the pedagogical implications for future research on get-passive as a guideline for English language teachers in terms of grammar teaching and learning activities, as well as teaching material designs.