More on “proven” as a proper American past participle

In a recent post, Have you proven your case?, I expressed rare disagreement with Bryan Garner about using proven as the past participle of prove. Garner’s Modern American Usage (3d ed. 2009) has this to say about that:

Proved has long been the preferred past participle of prove. But proven often ill-advisedly appears . . . .

. . . .

In AmE, proven, like stricken, properly exists only as an adjective . . . .

Prompted by Mike’s comment to that post, I did some research to support my disagreement with Bryan. I found support in the Oxford English Dictionary. The OED quotes numerous examples of proven used as a past participle, including this one dated 1957:

B. Evans & C. Evans Dict. Contemp. Amer. Usage 399/1   The participle proven is respectable literary English. In the United States it is used more often than the form proved. In Great Britain proved is used more often and proven sounds affected to many people.

The OED’s etymology for prove includes this paragraph about proven:

The past participle proven . . . is at least as common as proved in current North American English. It is also spreading into other varieties of English, in which the highest proportion of occurrences appears to occur in the past and perfect passive.

The OED gives the following definition of prove with accompanying comment on proven:

I. To demonstrate, establish.
1. trans. To establish as true; to make certain; to demonstrate the truth of by evidence or argument.
In this sense the past participle proven (orig. Sc.) is often used. In Sc. Law the verdict ‘Not proven’ is admitted, besides ‘Guilty’ and ‘Not guilty’, in criminal trials.

So what do you think, folks? Have I proven that proven is a proper past participle in American English?

__________

p.s. The New Oxford American Dictionary (2005) says this:

USAGE For complex historical reasons, prove developed two past participles: proved and proven. Both are correct and can be use more or less interchangeably . . . . Proven is the more common form when used as an adjective before the noun it modifies . . . . Otherwise, the choice between proved and proven is not a matter of correctness, but usually of sound and rhythm—and often, consequently, a matter of familiarity, as in the legal idiom innocent until proven guilty.

Comments

[Doug]

Before commenting, I re-read the "proved; proven" entry in my copy of Garner's Modern American Usage, and I agree that his argument is not convincing. He says that "proven" is ill-advised, but he doesn't explain why. The most he does is refer us to the section on irregular verbs, which briefly mentions that "[m]any past participles no longer exist as verbs in good usage, but continue as adjectives," without further explanation. Particularly after seeing what you found, I'd have to see more than what Garner included in his entry to convince me not to use "proven" as a verb.

Incidentally, I feel the same way about Garner's pronouncement favoring "pleaded" over "pled."

[Stephen R. Diamond]

Merriam-Webster's usage note:

"Usage Discussion of PROVE
The past participle proven, originally the past participle of preve, a Middle English variant of prove that survived in Scotland, has gradually worked its way into standard English over the past three and a half centuries. It seems to have first become established in legal use and to have come only slowly into literary use. Tennyson was one of its earliest frequent users, probably for metrical reasons. It was disapproved by 19th century grammarians, one of whom included it in a list of “words that are not words.” Surveys made some 50 or 60 years ago indicated that proved was about four times as frequent as proven. But our evidence from the last 30 or 35 years shows this no longer to be the case. As a past participle proven is now about as frequent as proved in all contexts. As an attributive adjective proven is much more common than proved."

[Ray]

Doug and Stephen: Thanks for your comments. From what I’ve read so far, it looks like GMAU is favoring the British usage over the American.