Chapter published in:
Late Modern English: Novel encounters
Edited by Merja Kytö and Erik Smitterberg
[Studies in Language Companion Series 214] 2020
► pp. 68–90

The myth of American English gotten as a historical retention

| University of Kiel
In this article, I investigate where and when the myth of American English as a conservative variety originates, and how it has become linked to the verb form gotten in particular. Drawing on corpus materials, prescriptive grammar writers of the time, publications on Americanisms, and nineteenth-century newspaper articles, this article shows that gotten is not a historical retention, but was revived in the nineteenth century in American English. However, this revival was not linked (yet) to the idea of it being a specific American form. Once this indexical link was established, however, it seems to have fuelled the rise of gotten further. The concept of gotten as indexing AmE linguistic conservativism is thus indeed a myth (if a powerful one).
Published online: 18 March 2020
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.214.03and
References

Newspaper databases

AHN America’s Historical Newspapers
contains over 1,000 newspapers published between 1690 and 1922, available at http://​infoweb​.newsbank​.com.
NCNP Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers
contains ca. 1.7 million articles from 1800–1900, available at http://​find​.galegroup​.com​/ncnp.

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Cited by 1 other publications

Anderwald, Lieselotte
2020.  In Voices Past and Present - Studies of Involved, Speech-related and Spoken Texts [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 97], ► pp. 188 ff. Crossref logo

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