English verbs selecting Bare forms

[Martin Jansche]

On Thu, 5 Apr 2001, James A. Crippen wrote:

> On Thu, 5 Apr 2001, Martin Jansche wrote:
>
> > 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.

That illustrates another point in favor of doing careful research.
Often one's own conceptions about what is grammatically possible are
blurred by potentially many factors, including one's theoretic stakes
in the outcome, traces of prescriptivism, failure to perceive things
that deviate from the norm, etc.  (What is the norm, BTW?  Your own
dialect?  Generic mid-western AmE?  Public media?  Ted Koppel?  And
who says we have to stick with the norm?  It would certainly help to
state some of the implicit assumptions here).  Let's take public media
for a moment.  If you search in the North American News corpora
(including LA Times, Washington Post, NY Times, and Reuters from
1994/5), you find 11 examples of "try + VP[bse]".  Here's one
(emphasis added):

  CHICAGO -- The federal government will take control of the Chicago
  Housing Authority next week to TRY IMPROVE the often wretched living
  conditions inside one of the nation's largest and most troubled
  public housing agencies, officials here and in Washington said
  Saturday.

Granted, it may have been written by a tired and underpayed journalist
at 4am in the morning (or so the usual story goes), but it's the first
sentence of a news story and thus presumably undergoes the most
scrutiny (though I'm not saying it did undergo any).

- martin