try and?

[Peter Richardson]

...and we dass'n't forget "He hauled off and..."        Does anyone have a
notion of what could originally have been hauled off? Or has this always
been intransitive?

PR

> Another early case of complementizer "and" is the "go and"
> construction (cf. Donne on "Go and catch a falling star").  This is a
> little freer in its distribution, occuring with past inflection:
>
> He used to {try to/try and} leap tall buildings at a single bound.
> He {tried to/*tried and} leapt tall buildings at a single bound.
>
> but ok:
> He went and leapt tall buildings at a single bound
> He went and ate all my cookies (=/= He went to eat all my cookies)
>
> Also, in non-inflected environments, the "and" can be suppressed:
>
> Go catch a falling star.
> Go (and) eat your own cookies.
>
> Larry
>