English verbs selecting Bare forms

[Stephen Nightingale]

>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.

Hmm, I thought the choice of Ted Koppel was particularly artful,
as (the legend has it) he is a transplanted Brit from the
North of England, so his speech would be a nice pan-Atlantic
compromise.  In which case he would also be familiar with
the contemporary use of "durst" in that part of the world, by
the kind of people who are not usually hired to read the news.
Which does underline the point that you need to avoid written
corpora if you want to study the spoken language.
I suggest that a look into the "North West Sound Archives" would
net you a fine crop of dursts.

    Lara>Martin, I think that "try talk some sense into them" sounds putrid, at
    Lara>least to my east-coast/midwestern american english ears...
    Lara>"try talking some sense into them" is the phrase.
    Lara>or, as Carl points out, "try and talk some sense into them"

I also agree entirely with Lara in the matter of "try Ving/try and V".

Stephen Nightingale.

P.S. Why do Americans always say some construction is archaic, if they
happen to have seen a written example in Chaucer?