The contrary substitution of the preterite for the perfect participle, as in "I have /went/" and "he has /did/," apparently has a double influence behind it. In the first place, there is the effect of the confused and blundering effort, by an ignorant and unanalytical speaker, to give the perfect some grammatical differentiation when he finds himself getting into it--an excursion not infrequently made necessary by logical exigencies, despite his inclination to keep out. The nearest indicator at hand is the disused preterite, and so it is put to use. Sometimes a sense of its uncouthness seems to linger, and there is a tendency to give it an /en/-suffix, thus bringing it into greater harmony with its tense. I find that /boughten/, just discussed, is used much oftener in the perfect than in the simple past tense;[46] for the latter /bought/ usually suffices. The quick ear of Lardner detects various other coinages of the same sort, among them /tooken/, as in "little Al might of /tooken/ sick."[47] /Hadden/ is also met with, as in "I would of /hadden/." But the majority of preterites remain unchanged. Lardner's baseball player never writes "I have /written/" or "I have /wroten/," but always "I have /wrote/." And in the same way he always writes, "I have /did/, /ate/, /went/, /drank/, /rode/, /ran/, /saw/, /sang/, /woke/ and /stole/." Sometimes the simple form of the verb persists through all tenses. This is usually the case, for example, with /to give/. I have noted "I /give/" both as present and as preterite, and "I have /give/," and even "I had /give/." But even here "I have /gave/" offers rivalry to "I have /give/," and usage is not settled. So, too, with /to come/. "I have /come/" and "I have /came/" seem to be almost equally [Pg206] favored, with the former supported by pedagogical admonition and the latter by the spirit of the language.
Whatever the true cause of the substitution of the preterite for the perfect participle, it seems to be a tendency inherent in English, and during the age of Elizabeth it showed itself even in the most formal speech. An examination of any play of Shakespeare's will show many such forms as "I have /wrote/," "I am /mistook/" and "he has /rode/." In several cases this transfer of the preterite has survived. "I have /stood/," for example, is now perfectly correct English, but before 1550 the form was "I have /stonden/." /To hold/ and /to sit/ belong to the same class; their original perfect participles were not /held/ and /sat/, but /holden/ and /sitten/. These survived the movement toward the formalization of the language which began with the eighteenth century, but scores of other such misplaced preterites were driven out. One of the last to go was /wrote/, which persisted until near the end of the century.[48] Paradoxically enough, the very purists who performed the purging showed a preference for /got/ (though not for /forgot/), and it survives in correct English today in the preterite-present form, as in "I have /got/," whereas in American, both vulgar and polite, the elder and more regular /gotten/ is often used. In the polite speech /gotten/ indicates a distinction between a completed action and a continuing action,--between obtaining and possessing. "I have /gotten/ what I came for" is correct, and so is "I have /got/ the measles." In the vulgar speech, much the same distinction exists, but the perfect becomes a sort of simple tense by the elision of /have/. Thus the two sentences change to "I /gotten/ what I come for" and "I /got/ the measles," the latter being understood, not as past, but as present.