Discussion Groups / ESL Teaching / June 2005

For starters, if you are using 'go across' or 'get across' to mean
'movement across something', then people will understand what you MEAN
with either, even if your English sounds strange. As for the more
technical difference between the two:

I think it's more the difference between 'go' meaning neutral movement,
and 'get' meaning 'going somewhere with effort'. I had a look at the
British National Corpus to check. The Corpus is a very large collection
of English writing and speech that we can search to see examples of how
English is used. It's useful to see what people 'go across' and 'get
across' (with the meaning 'movement'):

'go across' + the road, the street, the river, to the shops, the sky,
the fields ... (the road/street is the most common)

'get across' + the river, the border, the narrow neck of ..., the
Channel, the mountains, to Europe, the gully, the road, ...

It seems from this that if you are talking about movement, you 'go
across' if you simply move, but you 'get across' if you want to show
some effort involved in the moving. For instance, these sentences might
sound strange to some people:

- Look at that interesting man. Let's ??get across?? and talk to him.
('go across' sounds more natural here. From the context, the man
doesn't sound very difficult to reach.)

- It took us fourteen days to ??go across?? the mountains. ('get
across' sounds more natural here: if they're mountains, and it took
fourteen days, it was probably difficult.)

- A woman was standing at the corner, trying to ??go across?? the busy
road. ('get across', or just 'cross' would seem more natural here.)

However, by far the most common meaning of 'get across' is the
figurative one: get a message across, get an image across, get across a
fact, etc.

Does this help?

Jan

PS You can find the British National Corpus at http://view.byu.edu/.