English verbs selecting Bare forms

[James A. Crippen]

On Thu, 5 Apr 2001, Martin Jansche wrote:

> On Thu, 5 Apr 2001, Carl Pollard wrote:
>
> > Martin, is this your way of hypothesizing that TRY subcategorizes
> > for a base-form complement?
>
> Yes, I've heard requests of the form "Try talk some sense into them."
> quite a lot, and also (perhaps less frequently) "I'll try do a
> version" (BNC).

Those are both right out for me.  I actually had to consciously slow-parse
them a second time to even understand them.  For some reason it almost
sounds like a Southern American dialectical variation, but I could be
wrong.  It's certainly non-standard, at least around my part of the US,
and I can't say I've ever heard that in any public media.

The only forms that I can accept are 'try [and VP]' and 'try VP(inf)'.

'james

--
James A. Crippen <james at unlambda.com> ,-./-.  Anchorage, Alaska,
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