USAGE: gotten, boughten

agricola:

> 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.
Also shrunk-shrunken.  My wife and I were just discussing these
participle forms yesterday.  The prescriptivist in me cringed when
she used "boughten", though.  I didn't think it was standard AmE
usage.

-Tone