try and?

[Peter A. McGraw]

And the currently popular "Go ahead and..."  [go at hEd@n~gw at hed@n~gwEd at n]
(discussed here sometime ago).

Peter Mc.

--On Friday, April 18, 2003 11:47 AM -0700 Peter Richardson
<prichard at LINFIELD.EDU> wrote:

> ...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
>>



*****************************************************************
Peter A. McGraw       Linfield College        McMinnville, Oregon
******************* pmcgraw at linfield.edu ************************