“Like getting nibbled to death by a duck”

This large-scale corpus study explores new parameters which might indicate grammaticalization of the get -passive in recent American English, where the construction has increased in frequency. To this end, large samples of both be - and get -passives from the TIME Magazine Corpus were analyzed with regard to tense, aspect, and situation type ( Aktionsart ). While tense and aspect preferences of the passives were diachronically stable, the results of the situation-type analysis were of interest for two reasons. First, they showed clear differences in the way get - and be -passives are used which reflect the get -passive’s inchoative origins. And second, the diachronic analysis of situation-type preferences for get -passives provides a first indication that they may be further grammaticalizing as they begin to behave more like canonical be -passives in the most recent data. This finding is tentatively supported by supplementary data from COHA.