Extending collostructional analysis - www-user

122 Stefan Th. Gries and Anatol Stefanowitsch
ing findings). 7 Thus, abandoning the technique just because it cannot predict
constructional choices in all cases would be to throw out the baby with the
bathwater by prematurely dispensing with a technique whose other merits are
quite obvious.
4.2 Validation: Try to vs. try and
Potentially, distinctive-collexeme analysis may always yield distinctive collexemes,
even for pairs of constructions where this is not plausibly expected. If
this were the case, it would of course diminish the usefulness of the method
to a certain degree. We therefore need to apply it to an alternating pair where
we would not plausibly expect any distinctive collexemes, either because their
meanings are too close, or because they are of a kind that is not easily reflected
in classes of verbs.
One such pair is the one between the two main complementation patterns
of try,[try to V] and [try and V].
(12) a. Let’s try and keep it simple.
b. Let’s try to keep it simple.
The choice between these two alternatives is often claimed to be mainly stylistically
motivated (cf. e.g. the Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. try). Even where semantic
differences have been proposed, they are very tenuous and of a kind that
we would not expect to be reflected in particular verbs. For example, Nordquist
(1998) argues that [try and V] indicates the speaker’s belief that the agent is unlikely
to be successful in achieving the event encoded in the complement of try,
while [try to V] does not indicate any belief about the likely success of the agent.
As ‘likelihood of success’ is not a notion encoded in individual verbs, we would
not expect this meaning difference to show up in a collostructional analysis
method). Table 9 shows the results of the distinctive-collexeme analysis.
As expected, there are almost no distinctive collexemes for this alternating
pair. More precisely, there is only one significantly distinctive collexeme for
each construction: make for [try to V] and get for [try and V]. Furthermore,
even for these, the distinctiveness is weaker by many orders of magnitude than
for the top collexemes of all other alternating pairs discussed here. Finally, the
two distinctive collexemes are not interpretable in the context of the claims
concerning stylistic or semantic differences between the two constructions.
Uncorrected proofs - © John Benjamins Publishing Company