I remember writing about these constructions back in 1971 in a paper I did on serial verbs, a phenomenon found widely in West Africa, East and Southeast Asia, and the island of New Guinea.  In those languages typically additional verbs are used to extend valence and to combine events.  Verb phrases are used in series with no syntactic marking of relationship among them.  A typical example from Yoruba (Nigeria) is

 

Mo gbe        iSu  lO  si  Oja  (In the absence of IPA, S is <sh> and O is “open o” as in “four”)

I      pick-up yam go to market

I take yams to market.

 

“Gbe,” “lO,” and “si” are all verbs, but this is a single clause.  I was looking for analogous constructions in English, and the “take/up/go/try and” constructions came the closest but really didn’t meet the conditions for serial verbs because of the conjunction.  Serial verbs, in languages that have them, typically have only sequence to relate them, not any other syntactic marking.

 

I agree with the suggestion that these are modal-like constructions, but I think the “and” has be read differently from the conjunction “and” as we would normally use it.  I think here it has something more like clitic status.  In conjoined structures, the conjunction can be emphasized to indicate the nature of the conjoining, but in these constructions it can’t be.  Speakers who say, “I took’n broke it,” would never say, “I took AND broke it.”  We have other function words that behave in this way, especially “of” in partitive constructions like “a cup of coffee,” which usually reduces to “a cuppa coffee.”  In fact, in British usage “cuppa” gets used to refer to a cup of tea, as in “I’ll have a cuppa, please.”  If I remember right, Morenberg analyzes the “of” of a partitive construction as part of the quantity expression, not as a preposition, and I think he’s right.  It has cliticized to the quantity word and has lost its prepositional function.   “And,” in these quasi-modal constructions, is, I suspect, similar.

 

Herb

 

 

 

Those examples point out the extent to which the verb after “try and” seems locked into the infinitive as well. Now that I think about it, my strategy of treating “try and” as a unitary modifier-kind-of-thing doesn’t give me an good way to deal with that third-position restriction unless, as Janet mentioned, we treat the “try and” combo as a quasimodal. “Up and” seems more flexible – “He up and finished it,” “He’d up and finished it,” “He’ll up and run if you’re not careful.”  

 

Bill Spruiell

 

 

As I was trying to explore this construction, which seems quite natural to me in speech (not writing), it occurred to me that it didn't seem to work in the past tense or progressive, or perfect aspects (or tenses, depending on one's terminology).
Set 1
He tried and/an use it.
He has tried an use it.
He is trying an use it.

Of course as Bill Spruiell indicated
Set 2
He tried and used it
He has tried and used it
He is trying and using it

all teh examples in set 2 involve a different interpretation and are examples of a normal conjunction of two verbs (or VPs). (Incidentally, I don't find all of set 2 equally probable, but all are much better than set 1.

Do others have the same restriction?

The try 'an/and' construction seems perfectly normal after modals

Set 3
positive: He may / could / should try an use it
negative: He won't / can't /shouldn't try an use it


and in imperatives:
Set 3
Try an use it
Try and take it off the top.

If these restrictions are real and not just a figment of my memory and/or imagination, it would indicate that Bill's approach makes sense.
Peter Fries

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