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Chapter 12. American English gotten

Historical retention, change from below, or something else?
  • Lieselotte Anderwald
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Voices Past and Present - Studies of Involved, Speech-related and Spoken Texts
This chapter is in the book Voices Past and Present - Studies of Involved, Speech-related and Spoken Texts

Abstract

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.

Abstract

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.

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. List of contributors ix
  4. Foreword xi
  5. Chapter 1. Voices of English 1
  6. Part I. Early Modern English
  7. Chapter 2. Pragmatic noise in Shakespeare’s plays 11
  8. Chapter 3. Keywords that characterise Shakespeare’s (anti)heroes and villains 31
  9. Chapter 4. Revealing speech 47
  10. Chapter 5. Saying, crying, replying, and continuing 63
  11. Chapter 6. Interjections in early popular literature 79
  12. Chapter 7. Godly vocabulary in Early Modern English religious debate 95
  13. Chapter 8. Patterns of reader involvement on sixteenth-century English title pages, with special reference to second-person pronouns 113
  14. Part II. Late Modern English
  15. Chapter 9. Epistemic adverbs in the Old Bailey Corpus 133
  16. Chapter 10. Question strategies in the Old Bailey Corpus 153
  17. Chapter 11. Sure in Irish English 173
  18. Chapter 12. American English gotten 187
  19. Part III. Present-day English
  20. Chapter 13. Explaining explanatory so 207
  21. Chapter 14. Return to the future 227
  22. Chapter 15. Sort of and kind of from an English-Swedish perspective 247
  23. Chapter 16. From yes to innit 265
  24. Chapter 17. “If anyone would have told me, I would have not believed it” 283
  25. Chapter 18. Intensification in dialogue vs. narrative in a corpus of present-day English fiction 301
  26. Chapter 19. Orality on the searchable web 317
  27. Select list of publications by Merja Kytö 337
  28. Index 347
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.97.12and

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. List of contributors ix
  4. Foreword xi
  5. Chapter 1. Voices of English 1
  6. Part I. Early Modern English
  7. Chapter 2. Pragmatic noise in Shakespeare’s plays 11
  8. Chapter 3. Keywords that characterise Shakespeare’s (anti)heroes and villains 31
  9. Chapter 4. Revealing speech 47
  10. Chapter 5. Saying, crying, replying, and continuing 63
  11. Chapter 6. Interjections in early popular literature 79
  12. Chapter 7. Godly vocabulary in Early Modern English religious debate 95
  13. Chapter 8. Patterns of reader involvement on sixteenth-century English title pages, with special reference to second-person pronouns 113
  14. Part II. Late Modern English
  15. Chapter 9. Epistemic adverbs in the Old Bailey Corpus 133
  16. Chapter 10. Question strategies in the Old Bailey Corpus 153
  17. Chapter 11. Sure in Irish English 173
  18. Chapter 12. American English gotten 187
  19. Part III. Present-day English
  20. Chapter 13. Explaining explanatory so 207
  21. Chapter 14. Return to the future 227
  22. Chapter 15. Sort of and kind of from an English-Swedish perspective 247
  23. Chapter 16. From yes to innit 265
  24. Chapter 17. “If anyone would have told me, I would have not believed it” 283
  25. Chapter 18. Intensification in dialogue vs. narrative in a corpus of present-day English fiction 301
  26. Chapter 19. Orality on the searchable web 317
  27. Select list of publications by Merja Kytö 337
  28. Index 347
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