There are two forms of the passive voice in English: the BE passive and the GET passive. With GET passives, the meaning is ‘dynamic’, which means it expresses an action rather than a state.
Tania Bettleheim can’t remember her PhD supervisor’s name. It’s awkward. She should have glanced at the plaque on the office door before she came in.
She was too excited about her discovery to think of it. She’ll have a look on the way out.
‘So Kwinchuk lacks a copular verb, that’s what you’re saying?’ asks what’s-her-name.
Tania nods enthusiastically. It had been a eureka moment to figure that out, after the painstaking weeks she’d spent acquiring enough of the language to begin to chart its grammar. No one before had studied Kwinchuk. It would have been humiliating to come back with nothing.
But she hasn’t come back with nothing. She’s come back with a linguistic discovery of monumental import. The copular verbs thing is just the beginning.
Her mentor seems unconvinced. ‘I’d have expected in such a case for the copula to be inflected on a stative adjective stem. Did you consider the possibility of an unmarked zero form?’
‘It’s not zero marked,’ Tania insisted. ‘There’s a verb in the copular slot.’
‘A verb in the copular slot is necessarily a copular verb, Ms Bettelheim.’
‘But Professor, Professor, ehm…’
Perhaps this conversation would be going better if there weren’t so many distractions. Like not knowing what to call her supervisor. And those cracks in the walls. Tania’s sure these have been expanding in the course of this meeting, thin grey lines branching through the white paint like tree diagrams, growing more complex with each passing second.
‘Copular verbs express stative meanings,’ Tania explains. ‘The verb that appears in that slot in Kwinchuk is always dynamic. The nearest equivalent in English I can find is auxiliary “get”. In Kwinchuk it is impossible to say something like “I am happy”, except to express it dynamically.’
‘I get happy?’ suggests her supervisor.
‘Exactly!’ says Tania. She can tell her enthusiasm is not shared. The cracks in the walls are still spreading. Chunks of plaster are dropping from them. Her supervisor mindlessly stirs the falling white powder into her coffee.
‘Where’s the evidence of equivalence with the English “get” auxiliary?’ she demands.
‘It’s consistent with how the Kwinchuk experience their world,’ Tania argues. ‘Nothing for them is ever at rest, nothing ever simply is. Everything’s an event. Everything’s a story. A Kwinchuk has no way of saying something like, “That’s just the way things are.” They’d have to say something like, “Things got hard.” And so all their evaluations inevitably imply another eventive possibility, such as, “Things could get better.”’
It does not look as though Professor No Name thinks things could get better. The cracks in the walls have grown to gaping holes, and the masonry is now crumbling around them. The ceiling is buckling, and if Tania doesn’t leave immediately she’ll be trapped in a pile of rubble.
If she turns back now in her flight, she’ll catch a glimpse of the plaque that has fallen from the Professor’s door. She’ll see her own name engraved upon it in gold-painted letters.
She does not look.
She gets away.
Grammar for Dreamers 