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Part of
Voices Past and Present - Studies of Involved, Speech-related and Spoken Texts: In honor of Merja Kytö
Edited by Ewa Jonsson and Tove Larsson
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 97] 2020
► pp. 187–204

Chapter 12
American English gotten

Historical retention, change from below, or something else?

 | University of Kiel
I trace the history of the American English (AmE) past participle gotten, widely (but wrongly) regarded as a historical retention of an earlier BrE form. As corpus data shows, gotten almost died out in American English as well, but was then revived. Although get is found mainly in speech-related text types, the revival of gotten is not an innovation from below – contrary to linguistic intuition. Instead, its rise was promoted by careful writers who deliberately avoided the highly stigmatized stative have got. This explains why the perfect form gotten appears in more formal text types first, and how gotten became specialized to dynamic contexts only. AmE gotten is thus a curious case of an unintended side-effect of marginally successful prescriptivism.
Keywords: American English, language change, COHA, AHN, past participle gotten
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction: Gotten was lost, then revived in American English
  • 2.Who revived gotten?
    • 2.1 Gotten as a result of the development of an endonormative American standard
    • 2.2 Gotten as a Scotticism
    • 2.3 Gotten as a change from below
  • 3.How did the functional differentiation of AmE gotten develop?
    • 3.1The functional differentiation of gotten in prescriptive sources
    • 3.2 Gotten in wider societal discourses
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 5 October 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.97.12and
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