English verbs selecting Bare forms

[James A. Crippen]

On Thu, 5 Apr 2001, Mike Maxwell wrote:

> Carl Pollard (whose name my keyboard wants to spell "Calr") wrote:
>
> >You're right that many verbs are implicated,
> >but not all of them are imperative, e.g.
> >
> >  I'll try and get a reply off to them pronto.
>
> That's what I get for trying to send off an email during class break...
>
> I seem to recall a U of Washington dissertation in the mid-80s on this.  In
> fact, I think there have been lots of writeups on this.  So I probably
> shouldn't say any more, although I suspect it has intriguing things to say
> about what is or isn't a VP.  But--in your original msg, Carl, you wrote:
>
> >Funny, isn't it, that uninflected TRY will take an
> >AND+VP[base] complement, no matter whether
> >it is base, imperative, or present non-3rdsng,
> >but not the inflected forms TRIES, TRIED, TRYING?
>
> It's true you (OK, I) can't get
>     *I'll try and getting a reply off
> or even:
>     *I'm trying and getting a reply off.
> But aren't the ff. more or less OK:
>     It's no use trying and getting a reply off; the email is broken.

This one won't parse for me at all.  I'd star it.

>     He's forever trying and giving his teacher an apple.

I parse this as

  [He's forever trying] and [giving his teacher an apple]

In other words, "He's forever trying.  He's always giving his teacher an
apple."  I see 'and' as a copula, not as a 'try [and VP]' construction.

> And the ff. seem to be just fine:
>     He's going and getting a bigger hammer.

This one for me is borderline.  It'd be *very* informal, bordering on an
ignorable grammatical mistake in informal speech.

>     My friend is coming and fixing my bathtub.

This is inadmissible for me.

> Why this difference between "try and" on the one hand, and "go and" or "come
> and" on the other?

The interesting thing is that in the above two examples, both of which
weren't grammatical to me, you used a gerund as your VP.  That could be
something to think about.

'james

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