If you check the parent comment, the 'most' applied to the fraction of mysteries, not the the fraction of instances of the construction that the analysis is supposed to apply to. But anyway, this isn't an exception. The overwhelming generalization is that "try and do X" means the same as "try to do X". This holds for imperatives like the OP's example just as much as for my examples. There's very little difference between the to/and variants of any of the following:
Try and/to do it quietly
Try and/to be a little more polite.
Try and/to hand your homework in on time.
I agree that in some specific cases there are slightly different shades of meaning. However, this doesn't seem to be a very systematic phenomenon, or one that obviously justifies the assumption that "try and" is an elliptical expression of a complex multi-clausal construction.
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If you check the parent comment, the 'most' applied to the fraction of mysteries, not the the fraction of instances of the construction that the analysis is supposed to apply to. But anyway, this isn't an exception. The overwhelming generalization is that "try and do X" means the same as "try to do X". This holds for imperatives like the OP's example just as much as for my examples. There's very little difference between the to/and variants of any of the following:
Try and/to do it quietly
Try and/to be a little more polite.
Try and/to hand your homework in on time.
I agree that in some specific cases there are slightly different shades of meaning. However, this doesn't seem to be a very systematic phenomenon, or one that obviously justifies the assumption that "try and" is an elliptical expression of a complex multi-clausal construction.