dialect in novels

[Laurence Horn]

At 11:39 AM -0600 2/24/01, Natalie Maynor wrote:
>MVSCHNUR wrote:
>
>>  I think the "have" is superfluous. "Got" means, or should mean, "I obtained
>>  it", ie. I didn't have it, so I obtained [got] it. Thus, by getting it, I
>>  "have" it, is understood.
>
>I'm not sure what you mean by "should mean."  Something means what it
>means.  And language is full of redundancies.  Isn't the "ed" on "walked"
>redundant in "I walked home yesterday"?  The "yesterday" makes the past
>time understood, so we don't need the "ed."
>
>On the question of "got," is our US use of "gotten" on the decline?
>I was talking about it in a class recently, mentioning that "gotten"
>vanished from British English a long time ago (but "forgotten" is still
>used, isn't it?).  I then said our got/gotten contrast can be useful --
>"I've gotten a dog" does not mean the same thing as "I've got a dog."
>Several students said that they never use "gotten" at all -- that for
>that first sentence, they'd say something like "I just got a dog" or
>"I got a dog last week."
>    --Natalie Maynor (maynor at ra.msstate.edu)

How about in habitual contexts?
"That's OK, I've gotten D's on tests before."
"Every time I've eaten at my grandma's I've gotten sick."
"Whenever I felt this way, I've gotten myself a dog."

I guess I could get "got" here, but only if I recast them in the preterit:
"Whenever I felt this way, I(*'ve) got myself a dog."

Larry