idiomatic expression http://www.writinghood.com/tags/idiomatic expression New posts about idiomatic expression Some Uses for Get http://www.writinghood.com/Style/Grammar/Some-Uses-for-Get.72624 The verb get has been used more widely over recent years. I can remember when talking about it was incidental, not much was said about it other than it was an alternative to using verbs as "have" or "become". With the diversification of teaching and marketing the language in terms of what is more American and what is more British, people have been left slightly perplexed over the use of the word. Suffice it to say that in most circles wherever the new speaker goes, "get" follows certain grammatical rules according to the parts of speech that follow it and the word can be used with a variety of adjectives, past participles, prepositions and noun phrases to a totally different meaning from what the word would mean by itself.

Get can be used to mean "arrive" especially when followed by an adverb of location or the preposition to. Somebody that has to get to the station is then in the process of motion. If I say "got there at ten p.m.", then I am also talking about motion and the process of moving between two points.

Get can be used in place of buying or obtaining when preceding an object that has come into your possession. So when you "get a coffee" in the morning, you buy it and when you "get a diploma", it means you receive it after a period of study.

Get followed by a preposition will relate the idea of going or coming. So to get in would mean that you could be about to enter a vehicle, for example. Similarly, to "get out" would refer to your ability to leave a place or move outside from an enclosed space.

When get is followed by an adjective, that adjective will describe the state you could become. So if you "get rich", this would mean that you have been able to acquire wealth and if you "get poor", this would mean that you have lost your means to live adequately or have lost your better standard of living. If get is followed by a past participle adjective like tired then to "get tired" would be a way of describing that state of mind and the person using it is relating the notion of fatigue.

If get is followed by a preposition and a noun phrase, or there is an object between the verb and the preposition, then we can obtain some very useful idiomatic expressions. The meaning of the idiomatic expression is then much broader than just the meaning of the phrasal verb alone. So if "get out" once meant moving into an external space, or being told to leave a place immediately, to "get something out of this" would mean that the person has been able to learn something out of given situation. When learning phrasal verbs and the expressions they make up, the learner has to become familiar then with a real and figurative sense of the words that are put together.

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