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Comment by raldi | Hacker News Reader

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”.

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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.

"I have tried and finished my homework" is correct to my ear (possibly because I'm Canadian), but it means successful completion as opposed to "I have tried to finish my homework" implying I didn't get around to it.

That's not what "try and" means though. It's perfectly fine to say "I'm gonna try and fix this" when you don't know if you can fix it.

(Source: I say that shit all the time).

I would only say "try and" if I thought it was likely that I'd at least make some progress towards the goal.

If I expected failure, I'd instead say "try to" fix it.

Maybe, but even if true, it's still very clearly different from what the parent said.

To me, "I"m gonna try and fix it before I buy a new one, but that's probably what I'm gonna have to do" is a fine sentence.

For me, if someone says "try and see for yourself", it implies possibility of failure or something new.

If outcome is considered in terms of success or failure then try implies non-zero probability of failure. If outcome isn't considered in terms of success or failure then "try this flavour of ice-cream" is experience and try this outfit(fits or doesn't) is a test you can't fail. Philosophically, it is as master Yoda said: Do or do not, there is no try.

That sounds horrible to me. I’m going to try to fix it.

Then there's people like me who use the popular contraction for the first three words: "Ima try and fix this."

A contraction containing another contraction, in fact.

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.

That example would be something like 'I'll try to go to the store tomorrow and see if I can' along the lines GP suggests. 'stop me' only came from the specific example they were using.

You can actually construct this using regular VP ellipsis (or possibly Right Node Raising?) in English, but it sounds weird and doesn’t convey the same meaning. So I don’t think so.

“I’ll try to ___ and see if I can go to the store tomorrow”. [where ___ is the VP ‘go to the store’]

Then you have the various syntactic facts mentioned in the article , such as the possibility of wh-extraction. This isn’t possible in an analogous ellipsis construction:

“What did you try and eat?”

* ”What did you try to and see if you can eat?”

There’s also an interesting tense restriction which suggests that there’s no independent elided clause:

*”I tried and go/went to the store yesterday.”

"What did you try but spit out?"

That’s a regular case of across-the-board extraction from a coordination (where ‘try’ has a nominal direct object rather than a clausal complement):

What did you try ___ but spit ___ out?

The examples in the linked article involve extraction from just one coordinand, which is impossible in “real” coordinate structures.

Your examples are not ringing bells for me as a native speaker. The linguistics terms may or may not be confounding, but are too unfamiliar for me to discuss.

“Try, and [if successful] [do the thing].”

Sorry, I don't understand what you are getting at. What is the significance of the quoted sentence?

> I don’t think that’s anything like the meaning of

Parent post said "most"; you've identified an exception.

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.

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.

The people they’re citing are either authors of usage guides or linguists who are simply noting that the usage has been deemed incorrect by some of the former.

If a modern linguist call any usage as wrong, I would ask for his diploma and check if I have to close his university, because clearly they shouldn't teach linguistics 101, let alone bring someone towards a PhD. Linguistics is descriptive, not prescriptive.

Then linguistics is worthless. Descriptivism can't actually tell you anything; all someone can say is "yep, you sure are using that word that way". Fortunately prescriptivists still exist despite people's best efforts to give it a bad name.

Linguistics can explain why and how the language evolve, who caused this evolution. I don't know any modern linguist (as in doctor in linguistics) who ever wrote 'you should say this and not that', because all of them knows that languages change. The only 'prescriptivists' are bad philosophers and English majors.

How can you learn about how people spoke and the patterns that dictate how that changed over time if all you care about is what is considered technically correct at the moment?

These are not linguists doing that. No self-respecting linguists will waste time doing prescriptivism. These are two linguistic articles about this constructs that are quoting amateur language usage manuals. The oldest one is a boys magazine[1] published in 1864 discussing "the Queen's English"[2]. The newest one (Crews et al.) seems to be an obscure usage manual for writers[3].

As demonstrated here, "try and" is older and more "original" than "try to", if not contemporary with it. Any other reason why would "try to" be more "correct" cannot even make sense as anything more than a purely uneducated opinion. When you dig deep into most examples of perspectivism you'll usually run into the same story too. "Incorrect" forms often predate the "correct" forms and are often employed by respected writers (such as Shakespeare and Jane Austen). And even if they don't, there isn't really any scientific ground to brand one form as incorrect.

Linguists do not generally engage in linguist prescriptivism. As far as I'm concerned (and I believe most linguists would agree), this is stylistic opinion at best and pseudoscience at worst. Still, it's not linguists can do anything to stop amateurs from publishing prescriptive language usage manuals, so you'll always have people who claim that "try and" or "ain't" or "me and my friend went for a walk" are incorrect.

[1] https://www.victorianresearch.org/atcl/show_periodical.php?j...

[2] Yes, this is Edmund Routledge whose father is the namesake of the present scholarly publisher, but they were just publishing popular books back in the 19th century.

[3] https://www.amazon.co.jp/-/en/Frederick-Crews/dp/0070136386

Linguists don’t say varieties are right or wrong (even though they might have private aesthetic opinions like everyone else). That would be like a biologist saying dogs are the correct version of mammals and cats are wrong and/or don’t exist.

Biologists actually say the opposite of that!

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cats-are-perfect-...

Just because someone has a degree and a job in the field doesn't mean they understand how science works. Prescriptive biology is even sillier than prescriptive linguistics.

I think her tongue is planted firmly in cheek.

There do exist prescriptivist linguists, who do exactly that: they try to divine "correct" from "incorrect" usage of language.

> There do exist prescriptivist linguists

That is not true, at least in mainstream serious academia. Prescriptive linguistics doesn’t exist any more than prescriptive biology or astronomy.

Maybe in the USA. But bodies like the French Academy and many similar ones in other countries very much do issue opinions on correct grammatical (and vocabulary) usage. And members of these institutions are very much considered the top of their field in their countries.

The members of the French Academy are not linguists. They are mostly writers or academics from other fields (history, philosophy, etc). If you can read French, check here: https://www.academie-francaise.fr/les-immortels/les-quarante...

> And members of these institutions are very much considered the top of their field in their countries.

Maybe, but their field isn't linguistics.

*rein in

Some things like this are nevertheless generally known to be wrong despite usage

Though you also can't reign, in language.

And this is why I cringe whenever somebody tries to defend Perl's syntax by perlsplaining "But Larry Wall is a linguist!"

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)

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