I hope they don't get forgotten. A descriptive corpus-based approach to get-passives with verbs of cognition in English

Abstract

It is widely held in the literature that English get-passives are only found with dynamic predicates, stative verbs being excluded from it. However, based on an extensive corpus-based analysis of occurrences with the verbs forget, know, remember, understand and believe, this article shows that the get-passive with stative verbs of cognition, although infrequent, does occur in English. The so-called cognitive get-passive is then examined in relation to the formal, semantic and pragmatic properties commonly claimed to define central get-passives with dynamic verbs. The analysis reveals, on the one hand, that these features are not equally relevant in the characterisation of these sentences and, on the other, that there exist strong interconnections between them and the lexical properties of the verbs analysed.