alt Hacker NewsI 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”.
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I don’t think that’s anything like the meaning of “I’ll try and go to the store tomorrow”. There’s no implication that anyone is trying to stop me.
Also, your abbreviation analysis would still leave a syntactic mystery, as that sort of ellipsis doesn’t seem to follow any general attested pattern of ellipsis in English.
I think "Try and X" means "Try to X and do X" which means to my mind means to attempt and, upon success of the trial, to complete X.
"I’ll try and eat the salad." could be expressed as "I'll try eating some of the salad and, if possible, finish eating it."
I also like how several linguists attempt to call out this usage as wrong:
> deemed prescriptively incorrect (Routledge 1864:579 in D. Ross 2013a:120; Partridge 1947:338, Crews et al. 1989:656 in Brook & Tagliamonte 2016:320).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_prescription
You can't really reign in language.
This is a good intuition. The construction is actually sometimes jokingly called the "Try And"-C, where "C" stands for Complementizer, a thing that introduces and subordinates a clause.
This is also in line with skrebbel's observation in this thread that the phrase indicates a focused attempt.
Over time, people probably stopped needing to say the "and see if you can" part because the meaning was already baked in
I think this capture’s the essence better than anything else, “try and” simply behaving as “try and see if I can” (or whatever fits instead of “I” here)
You can also interpret the Dr Dre quote an abbreviation of, “I’m gonna try (to change the course of hip hop again) and change the course of hip hop again.”
In this form “try and” means you will try to do something and that you will succeed. Some of the articles tests make more sense in this light; Of course you wouldn’t reorder the trying and the succeeding because that’s the order the events will happen.
This ignores the fact that “try and” developed concurrently with “try to” and possibly before. So it wasn’t originally an abbreviation for a phrase that was yet to be established.