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.

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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