'Try to' or 'try and'? Verb complementation in British and American English

Grammatical differences between British and American English are often difficult to spot. This is probably because very often a form, a paradigm or an entire grammatical structure is available to a majority of speakers of both varieties, and the difference lies in the frequency of use - neither form is used exclusively in either British or American English. This is typically the case in the area of verb complementation; good examples are 'help', 'prevent', 'begin', and 'start', as demonstrated by e.g. Kjellmer (1985) and Mair (1995 and 2002). In this paper we show that there are also considerable differences between British and American English as regards the complementation of the verb 'try'. Our findings are based on a quantitative study of large corpora - totaling some 25 million words - of present-day British and American English. Adapted from the source document