The Curious Case of "Try and"
2025-08-10
This paper delves into the origins and properties of the English grammatical construction "try and." Often considered non-standard, "try and" boasts a surprisingly long history, potentially predating "try to." The paper analyzes its syntactic peculiarities, such as its disregard for the Coordinate Structure Constraint, its resistance to reordering or modification by "both," and its dialectal variations in inflection. Finally, it compares "try and" to similar pseudo-coordinate structures like "be sure and" and "go and," highlighting their grammatical and semantic differences.
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Misc
syntactic analysis