Languages in Contrast - Online First

This paper provides a contrastive analysis of the German bekommen and the English get passive. Sparked by their identical formation (GET verb + past participle), it contrasts their diachronic evolution and systemic function based on previous research and data from four corpora (Die ZEIT, Mode-/Beauty Blogs, TIME Magazine Corpus, COCA). Indicating that both passives are originally constrained in similar ways, e.g., by subject animacy, the data suggest that bekommen and get passive share significant commonalities. However, the GET passives in question grammaticalize from different source constructions. Therefore, they tread different paths of grammaticalization, with parallels such as the Subject Animacy Constraint becoming relativized when put into diachronic context. Besides grammaticalizing along different paths of grammaticalization, bekommen and get passives grammaticalize within different, language-specific voice systems. The contemporary German and English voice system have different functional gaps, which are, as will be argued, systematically addressed by the newly grammaticalizing GET passives.

While the contextually determined alternation of the velar and palatal fricatives [x] and [ç] is highly similar in Greek and German, the directionality of assimilation is strikingly different. Whereas Greek opts for anticipatory assimilation, perseveratory assimilation prevails in German. Moreover, this process stays within the confines of the syllable in Greek but may also cross syllable boundaries in German. A lexicon-wide phonotactic analysis reveals that Greek fricatives are mostly restricted to onset positions. By contrast, in German, 75% of the fricative tokens occur as codas and 25% as onsets. It is argued that anticipatory assimilation in Greek results from the restriction of fricatives to onset sites and that perseveratory assimilation in German stems from the preference of fricatives for coda sites. Thus, a probabilistic phonotactic bias leads to a categorical decision on directionality. The strategy of ignoring syllable boundaries allows German to manage with only one type of assimilation.