Dialectal variation and diachronic development of try-complementation

Abstract

English try can select a wide range of verbal complementation patterns, especially when dialectal variation is considered. This article presents an overview of these complement types. The goals are threefold: first, to present the variant forms with examples, citing previous literature; second, to establish a timeline for the development of verbal complementation with try, with a focus on the pseudocoordination pattern; and third, to consider variants found in modern dialects. Although this work is descriptive in nature rather than theoretical, the data presented here have implications for syntactic theory and future research and also establish a foundation for comparison with other languages.