Complementation patterns of the verb try

Resumo

This study aimed to investigate the factors that determine an English language user’s choice of the type of complement clause following the verb try. Focus was set on two of its four complementation patterns, namely the so-called pseudocoordination (i.e. try and + bare infinitive) and the try + bare infinitive construction. A corpus-based study was carried out, where the influence of six factors on the behaviour of the patterns under investigation could be assessed: Language change (1810-2009), language variety (British vs. North-American), language medium (spoken vs. written), discourse genre, semantic distinction, and horror aequi (i.e. the tendency to avoid the repetition of similar, adjacent structures). Overall, the findings of this study suggest, on the one hand, that both constructions are more frequent in British English, in spoken registers, and in less conservative written genres (e.g. fiction); on the other hand, they also indicate that (i) the constructions may be similar to one another in meaning, (ii) the horror aequi principle does not seem to be operative in determining their occurrences, and (iii) language change over time has not yet made them the two main complementation patterns taken by try. Importantly, the results of this investigation have a number of significant implications for the assessment of previous claims made about the verb in the literature. Finally, they also provide some interesting insights for future research.