This conversation about the get-passive has been very interesting. I hadn't
given it much thought before. This type of passive construction saturates my
English in informal settings (because it saturated my language environments
growing up). However, I don't believe it would come up in my formal register
at all.

I brought this topic up to my students, and we had a great discussion about
the usage of the construction. They brought up a point that Herb made --
some instances of the get-passive they ranked as much more acceptable than
others if they were to bleed into formal usage. Specifically, the
collocations like "get married," "get divorced," etc.

Very interesting!

On Sun, Feb 22, 2009 at 1:39 PM, Gerald Walton <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Re get+passive
>
> I once did a fairly extensive survey of elementary school students while
> working on a study of the use of passive voice. I would ask "What happened
> to the ___?" in an effort to elicit the passive voice. In one case I showed
> them a picture of a batter who had just hit a baseball.  When I asked "What
> happened to the ball?", about half of the time the students responded "It
> got hit." (For very young students many responded with the active "The man
> hit it.")
> Gerald
>
>
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