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A Corpus-based Study of Be and Get Passives in Argumentative Essays: Cross-linguistic Insights from Armenian Learners of English (102813)
Session Chair: Diana Hsienjen Chin
This presentation will be live-streamed via Zoom (Online Access)
Friday, 19 June 2026 10:40
Session: Session 1
Room: Live-Stream Room 2
Presentation Type:Live-Stream Presentation
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This paper investigates the distribution and functions of be and get passives in argumentative essays written by Armenian learners of English, comparing them with those produced by native English speakers. The analysis is based on a newly compiled learner corpus of Armenian EFL argumentative essays (approximately 28.000 words), constructed from scratch by the author (Nemishalyan & Soghomonyan, 2023; Nemishalyan, 2024). This corpus constitutes the first of its kind in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research. A comparable native-speaker corpus is employed as a reference, and corpus-analytic tools are used to examine syntactic patterns, semantic functions, and lexical collocations associated with passive constructions. It is hypothesized that Armenian learners will display a marked preference for be passives, reflecting the formality of academic writing (Huddleston & Pullum, 2002), while employing get passives less frequently and with limited functional range. Following Carter & McCarthy’s (1999) observation that adverbials are rare in get passives except as intensifiers, Armenian learner texts are expected to show even lower rates of such usage. Moreover, while native-speaker writing often exploits get passives to express attitudinal stance or evaluative meaning (Hatcher, 1949; Lakoff, 1971; Carter & McCarthy, 1999), Armenian learners are predicted to use these functions less consistently. Finally, the lexical range of verbs collocating with get passives is expected to be narrower and less idiomatic (cf. McEnery & Xiao, 2004). The research results confirmed the hypothesis: Armenian learners showed a clear preference for be passives, while get passives were used rarely and with a limited functional range.
Authors:
Emma Nemishalyan, French University in Armenia, Armenia
About the Presenter(s)
Ms Emma Nemishalyan is a University Assistant Professor/Lecturer at Yerevan State University, French University in Armenia in Armenia
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