Re: USAGE: gotten

You wrote:

>or is it ungrammatical in the US too and just somehow managed to >slip through?
Sounds perfectly good to me. A number of verbs have two past participles (one
equivalent to the root, the other with -en); and as far as I can tell, one or
the other is used as an adjective the other as a verb. As far as I'm concerned,
those in -en tend to be the adjectives:
sunken treasure, drunken man, boughten bread, etc. The simple participle is the verb:
the ship has sunk; the man has drunk; I have
bought the bread. Get is strange in that it doesn't really work as an adjective; and
I'd indiscriminately use got and gotten in all contexts I can think of at the
moment.

>Tristan
Padraic.