Verbal Pseudocoordination in English: A syntactic analysis with reference to diachronic, dialectal and cross-linguistic variation

Abstract

Pseudocoordination is a term that encompasses any natural language phenomenon in which apparent coordination (the presence of and) does not correspond to strictly coordinative syntax or semantics. For verbal pseudocoordination in English, two representative examples are 'try and do' and 'go and get'. The goals of this paper are to: 1) report the descriptive data that must be accounted for in any analysis of verbal pseudocoordination in English; and 2) analyze the syntactic properties of the 'try-and'-type of verbal pseudocoordination, which will be shown to share some properties with coordination and others with 'to'- subordination. An Appendix will also provide an overview of verbal pseudocoordination in other languages and a typology of verbal pseudocoordination in English that explains the diachronic development of these structures.