Hm... more linguistic musings

[conuly]

I seem to be on a languages kick lately, but it makes a nice change from depressing news articles about autism, doesn't it?

Anyway, I was talking to Xiggy earlier and I said something like "I have to go buy toilet paper". And then, after I said it, it sounded strange... shouldn't there be an and in there? Or maybe a to? After experimenting with a few other combinations (run buy, run get, go eat, find keep) I discovered that some combinations sound right, but others sound completely wrong. Why? And, more importantly, is this strictly related to my speech? A lot of the things I say aren't exactly standard (I reduplicate sometimes instead of saying "very", for example, and I say gigglesnort, not to mention mihi), but is this one of them?

Comments

[squittycat.livejournal.com]

"go buy" is fine. So are "go and buy" and "go to buy." Not all verbs can do this; "go" is sort of special here, but it's not restricted to "buy."

[conuly]

Yes, but why?