Passive with "to get"
In spoken English (at least in America), passives are often formed with "to get" rather than "to be;" I would wager the majority of the time:
- he got hit by a car
- I get driven to work
- I've gotten called for jury duty eight times
Are there specific verbs that prefer "be" to "get," or vice-versa, or semantic differences between these forms? I cannot think of any.
There is a long discussion in the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (p1441-1443) of the typical contexts in which the get-passive is more likely than the be-passive. The CGEL notes that:
i Get-passives tend to be avoided in formal style,
ii Get-passives are found only with dynamic verbs,
iii Get-passives are more conducive to an agentive interpretation of the subject,
iv Get-passives are characteristically used in clauses involving adversity or benefit.
Following are various extracts from CGEL's discussion of points ii-iv. (The authors do not regard point i as in need of further comment.)
The restriction to dynamic verbs: be is not replaceable by get in examples such as: It got believed that the letter was a forgery. Obviously, the manager gets feared by most of the staff.
Agentivity: Take for example the pair Jill was/got arrested. Either could be used used to report an event where Jill simply had a patient role, but if I believe she set out to provoke the police into arresting her or was careless in letting it happen I will be more likely to use the get version.
Adversity and benefit: Get occurs predominantly in passives representing situations that have an adverse or a beneficial effect on the subject referent, or on someone associated with it, rather than in passives representing purely neutral situations. Typical examples: Kim got sacked. My watch got stolen.
Such examples are much more natural than, say, The milk got bought at the store down the road or The door got opened by a shabbily dressed old man.
Swan, in his pedagogic grammar, Practical English Usage (p223) notes a further difference:
The get-passive is not often used to talk about longer, more deliberate planned actions:
?Our house got built in 1827.
?Parliament got opened on Thursday.
Finally, the Cambridge Grammar of English (a different text to the CGEL) observes (p539):
Prepositional phrases expressing an agent, although they do occur with get-passives, are far rarer than with be-passives.
In other words, She got arrested by the Austrian police is less likely than She was arrested by the Austrian police.
If he was hit by a car, that's the driver's fault; if he got hit by a car, that's his own fault. (By semantics, though this is mostly not intended in real use.)
If you happen to come in the way of a bad driver, you may be hit by his car.
If you don't give way, you may get hit by his car.
As already stated, most speakers may not maintain this distinction.