You don’t get to see that every day

Abstract

Abstract This paper contributes to the study of grammaticalization phenomena from the perspective of Construction Grammar ( Coussé et al. 2018 ). It is concerned with modal uses of the English verbgetthat express a permitted action, as inThe prisoners always get to make one phone call. Different views exist on the contexts in which permissivegetemerged. Gronemeyer ( 1999 : 30) suggests that the permissive meaning derives from causative uses (I got him to confess). An alternative is proposed by van der Auwera et al. ( 2009 : 283), who view permissivegetas an extension of its acquisitive meaning (I got a present). We revisit these claims in the light of recent historical data from American English. Specifically, we searched the COHA ( Davies 2010 ) for forms ofgetfollowed bytoand a verb in the infinitive. Besides examples of permissiveget, we retrieved examples of obligativegot to(I got to leave), causativeget(Who did you get to confess?), possessivegot(What have I got to be ashamed of?), and a category that we label inchoativeget(You’re getting to be a big girl now). Drawing on distributional semantic techniques ( Perek 2016 , 2018 ), we analyse how permissivegetand inchoativegetdeveloped semantically over time. Our results are consistent with an account that represents an alternative to both Gronemeyer (1999) and van der Auwera et al. (2009) , namely the idea that permissivegetevolved out of inchoative uses that invited the idea of a permission.

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