Tanto como / As much... as... - Page 2

Quote:

Originally Posted by Alfonso (Post 7988)

It was me the only unlucky one. But this was at least a week ago. Now I've already got over it. Life's beautiful!

Men are such fickle creatures!
Sorry;Jane. I hadn't seen your corrections.

Careful!

Jane, your options are either I've gotten or I got, but not I've got, something popular to say in Utah, as Rusty will understand, but a grammatical no no.

Let me rephrase that. In popular speech, it is quite common to hear the preterite--in this case, got--used in lieu of the past participle, gotten, in the present perfect and pluperfect tenses. You will also hear "I had ran," in the pluperfect and Bono says "I have spoke with eternal angels," in a hit song. So to some extent, it is an accepted construction. I suppose any language wherein the past participle looks identical to the preterite in regular verbs is going to fall prey to such over-regularization. Yet any classical grammarian, and every English professor I've ever had, would frown on such usage. To clarify, the classical grammar of the above instances would be:

Preterite - I spoke, I ran, I got
Pluperfect - I had spoken, I had run, I had gotten
Present perfect- I have spoken, I have run, I have gotten