English verbs selecting Bare forms

[James A. Crippen]

On Thu, 5 Apr 2001, Martin Jansche wrote:

>
> 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

I always thought that CBS Evening News's Dan Rather was supposed to be the
Official American Representative and since American English is obviously
the only really important form of English on Earth then Dan Rather's
speech should be the official lingiustic standard to measure English by.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with his boyish good looks and natural
charm and charisma, of course.  Or the fact that, like Casey Casem, he
occasionally curses in the middle of a broadcast.

:)

> who says we have to stick with the norm?

Particularly when investigating something like an odd formation the
dialect under study should certainly be emphatically stated.  It's no good
saying something like "English has this FOO form which is odd."  That's
just inviting dissent, especially with the English language.

> 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).

It's certainly an example.  I'd have to say that I'd like to see a
complete collection of such examples from the corpus before I'd go
admitting it as an actual usage form, even as a nonstandard dialectical
variant.  But you knew that :).

I still get mixed feelings about using written language.  Transcribed
speech makes sense to me, but there's many extra layers of uncertainty
related to using written language for study.  All the usual errors people
make in typing, or in losing their train of thought while working out how
to write a sentence (or paragraph), mistakes in the editing process (like
pasting a chunk into a sentence and forgetting to insert a copula or the
like).  These errors are IMVHO unrelated to the actual mental processing.
What they derive from are errors in the concious thought process of
writing and editing, which to me seems much less legitimate than the
mistakes people make in spontaneous speech.  What I'm saying is that
writing is much less spontaneous, and I feel that it doesn't reflect the
actual language produced by everyday linguistic mentation.

I suppose I've opened up a big can of worms with this, but I thought it
needed saying.  Anyway, I'm not flaming anyone, just philosophizing.

'james

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