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foldr 6 days ago

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.

OJFord 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

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.

foldr 6 days ago | parent [-]

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.”

cwmoore 6 days ago | parent [-]

"What did you try but spit out?"

foldr 6 days ago | parent [-]

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.

cwmoore 6 days ago | parent [-]

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].”

foldr 6 days ago | parent [-]

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

everybodyknows 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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

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

foldr 6 days ago | parent [-]

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.