Causative 'get' and 'have'. So close, so different
(2003) Journal of English Linguistics — Vol. 31, n° 2, p. 125-148 (2003)
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- This article is a first step towards the investigation of the relation between the verbs 'get' and 'have' when they are used causatively with a non-finite complement (e.g. 'I got him to help me'; 'I had the video fixed'). These two verbs are regularly presented as synonyms (e.g. Palmer 1974, 159). Indeed, they seem to be quite interchangeable in certain sentences (cf. 'I got/had my hair cut') and also share a number of syntactic characteristics: they can both govern an infinitive (to-infinitive for get and bare infinitive for have), past participle or present participle; they do not allow main-clause passivisation, or only marginally (*'He was had (to) leave the room');1 and they can be followed by a non-finite clause but express a different, non-causative, meaning, notably an experiential one (e.g. 'He got himself sentenced to death'; 'She had her bag stolen'). Syntactic likeness, however, does not entail synonymy. On the basis of corpus data from ICE-GB, we will see that, despite their apparent similarity, there is a world of difference between get and have.
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Gilquin, G. (2003). Causative ‘get’ and ‘have’. So close, so different. Journal of English Linguistics, 31(2), 125-148. https://doi.org/10.1177/0075424203031002002 (Original work published 2003)