“Try to do and try and do Again: Verb Complementation in Spoken American English”

Bibliographical details

Iyeiri, Yoko, Michiko Yaguchi, and Yasumasa Baba. 2013. “Try to do and try and do Again: Verb Complementation in Spoken American English”. Kyoto Working Papers in English and General Linguistics 2: Special Issue in Honour of Professor Keinsei Sugayama on the Occasion of his 60th Birthday,ed. Michiko Yaguchi, Hiroyuki Takagi, Kairi Igarashi, Tsutomu Watanabe, Takafumi Maekawa, and Taiki Yoshimura, pp. 265-79, Tokyo: Kaitakusha.

If you find it difficult to obtain this paper, please contact Yoko Iyeiri directly.

Summary of the paper

This paper discusses the try and do construction, mainly in relation to more common try to do. Although the try and do construction is considered to be typical of American English, it occurs as shown in this paper in British English as well, to a lesser extent, of course.

The data explored in this paper derive from the Corpus of Spoken Professional American English, which includes various types of discussions in formal settings. The result shows that the try and do construction is much less commonly observed than in British English, but attested in American English as well.

The study then concentrates on some linguistic environments where it is encountered, concentrating on: (a) when the verb try itself occurs in the in the form to try, (b) when try occurs after modal auxilialies, and (c) when try occurs in the imperative and in the form let’s try. The result shows that (c) seems to be more functional than the others.