The Passive across Two Registers of Present-Day British English

Anotace: is paper explores the use of the passive in present-day British English, focusing onits register-specific lexico-grammatical patterns. e interaction of the grammaticalstructure, lexis, phraseology and register is examined on the basis of two sub-corporaof the British National Corpus 2014 – academic prose and informal conversation.e results have corroborated the findings of previous studies in that the pattern ‘BE/ GET V-ed’ is populated by verbal participial forms which create a cline with de-participial adjectives. e communicative needs of registers have been shown to havea decisive impact on the frequency of passive patterns and the specific lexical choicesassociated with the patterns. In both registers, the ‘BE / GET V-ed’ patterns appearto constitute the core of larger fixed phraseological units, e.g., can’t be botheredto/with, or it should be noted that.