Forum: Author Hangout

Gotten v Got

Jack Green 🚫

I am used to seeing 'gotten 'in books written by US authors, acknowledging the word as one of the many differences in our 'common' language. However, I have noticed 'gotten' being frequently used in books written by UK authors and it sets my teeth (what's left of them) on edge. Has 'gotten' taken over from 'got' in British English? I can't recall hearing 'gotten' being used in conversation or on TV or radio but as my hearing is not of the best perhaps it has.

While I'm in rant mode: Upcoming v forthcoming. There is no doubt that in the UK 'upcoming' has displaced 'forthcoming' as the word meaning 'about to appear or take place'. Upcoming to my mind describes someone about to projectile vomit and why it has superseded a perfectly adequate word like forthcoming baffles me. Even the BBC, once the bastion of correct usage of British English has succumbed and uses upcoming rather than forthcoming. The iconoclasts have triumphed and Lord Reith must be spinning in his urn.

Now lockdown travel restrictions have been relaxed our youngest granddaughter paid us a visit yesterday. She asked if the mobile phone I recently bought was a smart phone.
'Yes,' I replied. 'It's a clamshell type, with a cherry red casing and a chrome trim. Very smart.'

She looked at me gone out.

Replies: Dominions Son Dominions Son Crumbly Writer Mat Twassel awnlee jawking richardshagrin Switch Blayde Redsliver Ernest Bywater Uther Pendragon helmut_meukel

Dominions Son 🚫

@Jack Green

Gotten v Got American English
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=gotten%2Cgot&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=28&smoothing=3#

Gotten V Got British English
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=gotten%2Cgot&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=28&smoothing=3#

1. Gotten shows up in both American and British English all the way back to 1800.

2. The frequency of gotten in both is negligible against the frequency of got. Got is an order of magnitude more frequent in both.

3. The frequency of gotten does show a recent increase in both, staring in the 1980s in American English and starting around 2005 in British English.

4 On both sides, despite the recent uptick in frequency, gotten is still an order of magnitude less common.

Replies: awnlee jawking

awnlee jawking 🚫

@Dominions Son

Do you need to do something to the parameters to search for ' got ' against ' gotten ' so you don't get all occurrences of 'gotten' also counting towards 'got'?

AJ

Replies: Dominions Son

Dominions Son 🚫

@awnlee jawking

The google Ngram viewer can do phrases too. That's why the search items need to be comma delimited.

My understanding is it only matches complete words/phrases against complete words/phrases.

Replies: awnlee jawking

awnlee jawking 🚫

@Dominions Son

Hmmm. Google really don't want people using 32-bit browsers on Ngrams. But I found this

AJ

Replies: Dominions Son

Dominions Son 🚫
Updated:

@awnlee jawking

That really doesn't change anything in terms of conclusions. There is some change in the raw freuencey numbers, but the relative frequency of the two words is still more or less the same as what I linked above, 'got' is still an order of magnitude more common than 'gotten'.

Replies: richardshagrin awnlee jawking

richardshagrin 🚫

@Dominions Son

gotten

After you get nine and before you get eleven, you have got ten.

Replies: graybyrd

graybyrd 🚫

@richardshagrin

And after you've got ten, you've bought it; after which you may have boughten eleven.

awnlee jawking 🚫
Updated:

@Dominions Son

'got' is still an order of magnitude more common than 'gotten'

That bothers me. Perhaps it's my mind playing tricks, but I have the same impression as @Jack Green, that 'gotten' is common in US English. Am I missing something?

I tried SOL's advanced search - both 'got' and 'gotten' appear in 1000 stories, which I believe is shorthand for 1000+.

AJ

Replies: Dominions Son

Dominions Son 🚫
Updated:

@awnlee jawking

One thing you need to keep in mind. Ngrams isn't just using a count of the number of books/documents in which each appeared, it's counting how many times each occurred in the totality of the text that makes up the corpus being searched.

Your SOL searches are giving you a count of the # of stories that used each term. But it doesn't tell how many times each story used each one. The raw result count of those SOL searches also doesn't tell you anything about how the usage of each is distributed across years.

As CW noted above both "got" and "gotten" are valid but they represent different tenses, "got" is simple past tense of "get" while "gotten" is past perfect tense.

Could some people be using gotten when they should be using got, sure. Ngrams does show a recent uptick in the use of gotten for both American and British English. It's just not nearly enough of an uptick to suggest that gotten is replacing got.

Dominions Son 🚫

@Jack Green

While I'm in rant mode: Upcoming v forthcoming. There is no doubt that in the UK 'upcoming' has displaced 'forthcoming' as the word meaning 'about to appear or take place'.

There is some doubt there.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Upcoming%2Cforthcoming&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=29&smoothing=3#

In 2018, the most recent year in the Ngrams British English corpus, the frequency of forthcoming is two orders of magnitude higher than upcoming.

Crumbly Writer 🚫

@Jack Green

This isn't an official etymological distinction, but my understanding has always been that "got" is the past tense version of "get", while "gotten" is the past-perfect tense, which is borne out that the use of "gotten" is relatively rare, even among those us do use it regularly. (If you don't understand the difference, research 'past perfect tense' in Google, but generally, it's not the most productive tense for modern fiction writing.)

It a way, it's related to the pull, pulled and drawn. Each has a specific use, though the overly formal "drawn" is barely used anymore, though you'll still find it in most pre-1950s books. Nowadays, it's more likely used to describe someone's face following a traumatic experience.

Mat Twassel 🚫

@Jack Green

Get over it.
He is getting over it.
(In conversation it's: He's gettin' over it.)
He got over it.
He has gotten over it.
He had gotten over it, but then it came back and got him.

Now we've got him right where we want him.
Don't forget he's the forgotten man.

Replies: Crumbly Writer

Crumbly Writer 🚫

@Mat Twassel

Don't forget he's the forgotten man.

But never forget, we've gotten the forgotten man before, and we'll get him again, once he's drawn up his drawers and leaves the rest room!

awnlee jawking 🚫

@Jack Green

Allegedly we Brits used to use 'gotten' and the colonials inherited it, then we economised to 'got'. However I think you're right about the increase in 'gotten' in British English, although it hasn't yet sullied the newspapers I read except when used in direct quotes.

AJ

richardshagrin 🚫

@Jack Green

Upcoming

And then there is upstanding versus standing up.

If the female is in one of the cowgirl positions, likely you will be upcoming.

Switch Blayde 🚫
Updated:

@Jack Green

Crumbly is right. "Got" is simple past tense while "gotten" is past perfect tense.

But from an MIT site:

In informal contexts, many speakers use have got, 've got, or simply got to mean "have" or "must." You should avoid this usage of the verb get in your writing; instead, use have or must.

Example: "We've got to find a solution" vs "We must find a solution." But "got" here is used as present tense. It's not proper English.

Replies: Grey Wolf Mat Twassel awnlee jawking

Grey Wolf 🚫

@Switch Blayde

And here we're back to dialogue vs non-dialogue. With the people I hang out with (who tend to be fairly well educated and have decent grammar) "We've got to" would be much more common in speech than "We must".

Replies: Switch Blayde Crumbly Writer

Switch Blayde 🚫

@Grey Wolf

And here we're back to dialogue vs non-dialogue.

I always respond assuming it's in the narrative.

Crumbly Writer 🚫

@Grey Wolf

And here we're back to dialogue vs non-dialogue. With the people I hang out with (who tend to be fairly well educated and have decent grammar) "We've got to" would be much more common in speech than "We must".

You don't add unrelated words. In your example, it would be "We have to," as 'have got' makes sense, as I always want to ask, "What has you got?" though maybe I should say "What had you gotten?" instead.

Mat Twassel 🚫

@Switch Blayde

Got has an interesting present/past tense usage as in:

We got him.

without the context we don't know whether it's past or present.

awnlee jawking 🚫

@Switch Blayde

In informal contexts, many speakers use have got, 've got, or simply got to mean "have" or "must." You should avoid this usage of the verb get in your writing; instead, use have or must.

My dictionary doesn't list it as 'informal'. Perhaps that's a US convention.

AJ

Replies: Switch Blayde Switch Blayde

Switch Blayde 🚫

@awnlee jawking

My dictionary doesn't list it as 'informal'. Perhaps that's a US convention.

How many times do you see "gotta" in dialogue in a story? Short for "got to" as in "I gotta get out of here" or "I gotta have it."

It's common in dialogue, but not so in formal writing, such as the narrative portion of a story.

Switch Blayde 🚫

@awnlee jawking

My dictionary doesn't list it as 'informal'. Perhaps that's a US convention.

dictionary.com

verb
a simple past tense and past participle of get.

auxiliary verb
Informal. must; have got (followed by an infinitive).

Now at dictionary.cambridge.org it simply says:

Got is also used with "have" or "has" to show that someone has or possesses something: (informal is not mentioned)

It's probably becoming standard usage like using "can" when you mean "may" as in "Can I have it?"

Redsliver 🚫

@Jack Green

Got and gotten. I said gotten a lot as a kid in the nineties. Now, it looks natural in speech to me. But when it comes to how the use of words evolve in English, I'm reminded of this important quote:

Language is going to change irregardless of your attempts to literally lock it away in the tallest tower. Obvs.

- Welcome to Night Vale

Ernest Bywater 🚫

@Jack Green

I think I got all there was in this thread, but if it had been better set out I might have gotten more from it.

Uther Pendragon 🚫

@Jack Green

As for me and my house, it's "have got" except in dialogue, and mostly there.

helmut_meukel 🚫
Updated:

@Jack Green

From Wiktionary:

get (third-person singular simple present gets, present participle getting, simple past got or (archaic) gat, past participle got or (American, Canadian, Irish, Northern English, Scottish, archaic) gotten)

It's obvious ngrams will find got whenever it's used as simple past plus when it's used as past participle.
What we needed were how often got is used as past participle versus gotten as past participle.

HM.

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Gotten v Got

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