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Possibly-interesting comparison: in Japanese, the way to talk about trying to do some verb-phrase X, is "Xて見る" — which is usually literally translated as "we'll try [X]ing", but which breaks down into "[verb-phrase X in present tense] [the verb "to see" in whatever tense you mean.]"
Which means that the construction can be most intuitively framed (at least by an English speaker) as either "we'll see [what happens when] we [X]"... or, more relevantly, "we'll try [X] and see [what happens/how it goes]." Or, for short: "we'll try and [X]."
The point I was waiting for them to get to was saved for last: entails completion.
Try to do something, you might or might not do it. “I’m going to try to persuade them to decide in my favor.”
Try and do something, you expect to get it done one way or another. “I’m goin down there to try and straighten them out.”
I don’t have a long history of research in this going back to the 1500s, but I grew up in southeast Texas, and this is how I’ve always understood it to be used around here, when it is used with any intention at least.
It's kind of funny that in Norwegian, people mix up the infinitive "to" and "and", as they are pronounced the same, "o" in IPA. So we have the same thing in Norwegian writing, but if you happen to use "and", you must use the imperative form of the verb for it to be grammatically correct. So, "try to stop me" is "prøv å stoppe meg", and "try and stop me" is "prøv og stopp meg". The latter is much more colloquial.
This isn't a problem in Swedish and Danish, as their infinitive marker is "att/at", which in Norwegian only means "that" in its conjunctive form.
I wonder if there's any relation to the Norwegian here.
I think most of the mysteries in this piece can be explained if “try and stop me” just an abbreviation for “try to stop me and see if you can”.
As a nonnative speaker of English who lived more than 30 years in an English speaking country, "try and" sounds to me as bad as "should of". Right or wrong, I perceive it as something an "uneducated" person would say. That said, I firmly believe that correct language is whatever people deem to be appropriate for their communication.
> regular coordination permits the order of conjuncts to be changed, while in (7) we see that the same is not possible with try and (De Vos 2005:59).
But sometimes conjunction implies sequential order or causation, right? Which seems related here. “I’m going to take a shower and get this dirt off me” or “I’m going to get some flour and bake a cake.” You can’t change the order. It doesn’t make sense to add both in those cases, either.
It’s also interesting about motion verbs, because I see “he came and picked me up at the station” as an example of two literal sequential actions, versus “he went and picked me up at the station” as more about emphasis, like he did something notable. Which could be good or bad: “he went and got himself arrested again.”
Prompted by reading an instance of "try and" instead of "try to" in an HN-linked Register article[1] this morning, I thought this might be of interest to both non-native and native English speakers in our community.
Try to ascertain why I'm on Team "Try To"! (If you feel like trying and! J)
To me, “try to catch me!” feels more formal than “try and catch me!” Which feels kinda playful, but are both saying basically the same thing.
Interestingly this pattern also exists in Danish (though not for the same reasons). Correctly speaking you’d say “try to…” which is “prøv at…”, but since the infinitive “at” and “og” sort of both turned into /ə/ when quickly spoken and you get “prøv og…”.
It makes sense from a boolean perspective. E.g "I'll try and go to the store." If the try fails, you did not go to the store.
Every time I read something like this, I remember that there is truly no correct way to say something - all that matters is that your intended audience understands it, eventually.
"try and <clause>" is syntactically correct.
That is to say,
> I'm going to try and change the course of Hip-Hop.
can be parsed as
> I'm going to try; I'm going to change the course of Hip-Hop.
which has been subject to a well-understood extraposition process to factor out the leading "I'm going to" from all the clauses, so that a single copy of it distributes into all of them.
It's essentially the same as what is going on in the following unassailably correct sentence:
> I'm going to turn on the TV, crack open a beer, and watch the game".
Also note that this "and" is not something which exclusively pairs with "try":
> Linguists, go ahead and fight me!
‘Go and put your shoes on’ is correct British English. We consider ‘Go put your shoes on’ as incorrect grammar. So ‘try and put your shoes on’ would also be natural. I’m trying to think what other verbs this would work with because ‘find and put your shoes on’ doesn’t sound right in British English but neither does ‘find put your shoes on’ in US English perhaps someone who understands grammar better can explain why some verbs work with this construction and some don’t.
English, Simplified is now called “grammatical diversity”? That’s so politically correct.
The whole parent directory of "Phenomena" https://ygdp.yale.edu/phenomena-by-category is an amazing source of information!
The argument from about 10 years ago forward is that because English is already messed up, we should allow any usage of the language possible.
British English speaker here (southern demographic) - I'd say "to" but "and" doesn't feel wrong so I think it's pretty prevalent.
I'm curious how common it is in Indian English.
"try and" is a pet peeve of mine.
"try 'n" sounds suspiciously close to "tryin'", so I suspect that people who were saying "tryin' to" began to reanalyse the first two syllables as "try 'n" and then started dropping the newly-superfluous "to".
This is also the construction used for FAFO
FA = "try" (as a vulgar slang)
When you de-vulgar/de-slang it it becomes: try and find out
> In dialects of Northeastern Canada, parallel inflected forms are acceptable:
> 12) They tries and does that.
There is a Ricky Jervais show https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Life_(TV_series) where the main character talks like this alot but not because that is common in the UK but perhaps to show he is a bit simple/slow. I think there is a danger in making that assumption about anyone based on the accent or general way they talk.
Hang on. Isn't "try and" just completely different from "try to"?
"Can I leave work early?" "Try and see."
This is at worst a threat, and at best telling the other person to just do it and ask for forgiveness later afterward than for permission beforehand.
"Can I leave work early?" "Try to see."
This is telling the person to go research the answer to figure it out properly. And it feels less natural to say it too.
How can these be interchangeable in meaning? If anything they feel closer to being opposite in meaning here.
The "and" in "try and..." may be a shorthand for the material implication of two temporal modal paths:
"try and X" = can X -> must X = not can X or must X
That said, the word "both" doesn't collocate before "try and X" because it instead pushes us toward an interpretation as logical conjunction:
"both try and X" = can X and must X
Likewise, despite the usage of "try not to", the phrase "try not and" doesn't show up, because under material implication the phrase becomes nonsense:
"try not and X" = not can X -> must X = can X or must X
I did an introduction into the basics of linguistics in secondary school and something my teacher pointed out that a rule of thumb is that common phrases or words are the most likely to break grammatical rules.
He then told me a story about a language that was invented to be perfectly regular, and then there was a generation of native speakers of this artificial language and the first thing that happened was common phrases became irregular.
I believe the language must be Esperanto but I'm struggling to find a reference to this anecdote
I'm not a native English speaker, but to me "try and" has always conveyed a sense of more deliberate trying, of getting over yourself, in the sense that the "try" means the choice to give it a real proper go. So first you try (or, in fact, decide to try) and then when you're fully committed and mentally prepared, then you do it.
With an interpretation like this, none of the syntactical stuff in this story seems useful anymore. You try, and then you do.
Does this make any sense at all or am I just a foreigner imagining things?
To me "try and" is like a more confident version of "try to." For example, "I will try to win" vs "I'll try and win."
Good grief. Quote Dre up top, then totally ignore AAVE and Southern American English which both heavily feature the construction of interest, despite being interested to find out what the Boer pidgin, of all things, has to say. (Why not Basque next? That would be about as relevant!) This they call a linguistic diversity project? Surely they could not have found themselves short of sources!
What about "try ya" as in "try ya some of that there salad." Something my mother-in-law would say.
The syntactic quirks make it feel like a weird halfway point between coordination and some fossilized idiom
This article illustrates the main reason why prescriptive grammar is so boring.
If instead of just writing things off as “wrong”, we accept that they happen and try to understand why and under what circumstances, we unlock a whole incredibly interesting new field of science.
I don't understand the 'both is not possible' point, the example given just doesn't even attempt to add a second thing?
> John will both try and kill mosquitos[, and find where they're coming from].
Works fine?
This construction is similar to a hendiadys (which comes from the Greek for "one through two"); e.g. "nice and warm." (So says Fowler anyway.)
Maybe it's different in America but this is being bizarrely over thought in the comments. It's a synonym for "try to".
When I was in high school in France, where they teach British English, we were taught try and is the grammatically correct form.
what about "I'll try better"?
A lot of American commenters here are very much misunderstanding how "try and" is used in British English.
It genuinely is used essentially equivalently to "try to". Maybe there is some very slight semantic difference, but it's essentially the same.
Randy Meisner was not trying "to" love again. Usage settled.
The use of "try and" is usually grammatically incorrect (when "try to" was meant).
Why there are so many rules for speaking
Example usage: I will try and figure out how this page is causing the scrollbar to be white-on-white in a way that makes it useless.
This pales when compared to my favorite grammatical annoyance, a common perverse construction, for example "... similar effect to ..." when "... effect similar to ..." is actually intended. This misordering is so common that, in a Web search, it appears to outnumber the canonical ordering.
I acknowledge that terms like "canonical" argue for a nonexistent language authority, and that an acceptable word ordering is any one that conveys what the speaker intends.
Try and is good. Philadelphia we also have good ones. especially dropping with/tos
- Down the shore - done school, done work, done dinner.
Also my favorite is anymore:
- gas is so expensive anymore
Hadn't heard about this project before; it's a really good idea.
English is not a language that either lends itself well to, or is historically regulated by, prescriptivism (with a few specific attempts that didn't claim universal adoption). Treating it as a language where "If you've heard this novel construct, here's where it came from and what it's related to" is a good way to approach it.
(I liken it often to C++. C++ is so broad that the ways you can glue features together are often novel and sometimes damn near emergent. It's entirely possible to be "a fluent C++ user" and never use curiously recurring template pattern, or consider case-statement fallthrough a bug not a feature, and so on).
"However, De Vos (2005:59) points out that try and may not be preceded by both: " [example] "John will both try and kill mosquitos."
Then the next sentence has "try and is available only when both try and the verb following and are uninflected". (only when "both try and") I know the italicization of "try" and "and" makes it a different thing grammatically, just thought it was amusing.
Surprised if they are quoting Dr Dre they don’t mention “run and…” (as in “run and tell that”)
> (a) try (./!)
> She shouted: Try! Try, try, try! Just fucking try it!
> try as you may/might
> try is my favorite word
> try harder
> try 1/2/3/…
> try, quickly!
Do my examples fit in those 3 examples?
Me thinkest thoug dost not knoweth English very well.
And I am not even a native speaker.
But then again, I have no Harvard education, so what do I know.
Not too long from now, Yale will likely also give the "would of" construction its blessing.
At first glance, I thought this was some new TC39 JavaScript syntax proposal.
This is a cool site. I thought I'd look for a page about my favorite syntactic phenomenon, "what all", and not only did I find it, but also they changed the "Who says this?" section header to "Who all says this?"
https://ygdp.yale.edu/phenomena/what-all