Past Participle Causative Get-Constructions in English and their Macedonian Equivalents

Abstract

This study investigates English causative get-constructions with a past participle and their Macedonian translation equivalents in written texts. These constructions are classified as prototypical, encoding indirect causation with a suppressed causee, or non-prototypical, marked by an agentive subject whose volitional involvement introduces pragmatic effects. Prototypical constructions resemble passives in their suppression of the agent, while non-prototypical ones highlight the agent’s determination to complete an action. For the purposes of contrastive analysis, over 40 English e-books and the ParaSol and CLARIN.SI corpora were examined. English examples and their Macedonian translations were manually extracted and categorized by genre into two samples: literary and documentary prose. The analysis shows that both types are most frequently translated into Macedonian by using active verbs, with lexical verbs being more common in non-prototypical cases, whereas biclausal structures are rare. The findings highlight typological differences in how causation is expressed in the two languages and reveal how constructional meaning can override the original causative function of past participle get-constructions. This suggests that the compactness of the English causative get-construction is reflected in the choice of translation equivalents.