ABSTRACT
In most cases, the data are called upon to prove or support a theory, model or framework elaborated by the grammarian, albeit sometimes it is called upon selectively while ignoring other available or possible data. The trouble was that until there were first of all tape recorders and then computers, it was impossible to assemble the data a grammarian needs’. In the corpus linguistics, it was difficult to tease out facts about language use from the data, with long strings of complex commands needed to get the computer to produce word lists, concordances or anything that the linguist could make sense of. Frequency based on corpus data played a role in the evaluation of grammatical acceptability from the 1980s onwards. Exploring the verb get in the spoken corpus, as well as providing ample evidence of its delexical nature, yields numerous examples of the so-called get-passive, i.e. constructions such as get damaged, get paid, get chosen.
