try and?

[Arnold Zwicky]

larry horn on TRY AND:

 >Also, in non-inflected environments, the "and" can be suppressed:

 >Go catch a falling star.
 >Go (and) eat your own cookies.

to say this carefully, GO/COME occur in a construction with AND
and a following VP and also in a construction with an immediately
following VP (with no AND).  that's not to say that an AND is
suppressed.

it's by no means clear that the hendiadys construction is even the
*historical* source of the quasi-serial verb construction.  an
attractive alternative is that the quasi-serial verb construction
is a reinterpretation of asyndetic coordinations like
  Go/Come, see who's at the door.
(on this story, the loose and paratactic combination of verbs here
was reinterpreted as a tight and hypotactic combination, that is,
as complementation.)  i'm beginning to collect evidence in favor of
this alternative historical story.

in any case, as larry well knows, that fact that you have roughly
synonymous pairings of X w Y with X Y (for some word w) doesn't
mean that the latter is synchronically derived by suppressing,
omitting, or deleting w from the former.

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)