Re: USAGE: gotten, boughten

draqonfayir@JUNO.COM writes:

> I personally don't remember ever hearing "boughten" before this.
I second that motion...boughten? weird..Never heard a New Yorker say it, never
hear a Californian say it, never heard any one from the East Coast say
it..never heard any one from the West Coast say it. The one person I know from
Indiana, would never say it..It's just odd.


CONTINUED BELOW

> -Stephen (Steg)
>  "old linguists never die;
>   they just come to voiceless stops."
>
>
> On Mon, 24 Jun 2002 15:10:31 EDT Eli Ewing <CelticSlim@...> writes:
> boughten is another word I commonly use as a past participle (that is, on those rare
> occasions I use past participles). Gotten, boughten. Not sure about drunken -
> I can't remember using that except for an adjective. I've never used (usen?)
> gotten or boughten as an adjective.
What do you mean "rare occasions"? You have to use past participles in all tenses
of the Perfect aspect:

I have gone
I had gone
I will have gone

gone = past participle.

I have walked
I had walked
I will have walked

walked = past participle.

Are you thinking that only words ending in -en are past participles? Then that's
just wrong, -en is one allomorph of the past participle suffix. Other suffixes
include -ed (walked), -t (bought). Other forms include, ablaut (got, sung,
drunk) (although, gotten with ablaut and -en is acceptable too), and
zero-change (cut, put). All of these are Past Participles.

Past participles are commonly used in the Perfect Aspect and the Passive voice as
well as in an Adjectival function. Of course, as has been discussed, some
Passive Verbal Adjectives differ in form from Past Participles: drunken
(although, drunk can be an Predicate Adjective, like "he is drunk"), dead
(instead of died).

But you can't say you don't use Past Participles, they're everywhere in the
language...no easy way to get rid of them.


Elliott Lash.