English Language & Usage Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
The usage you put the verb (in its infinitive form) right after "go" is used in AmE but not in BrE, as I heard. For example,
Go shut the door.
However, I doubt this is true and want to know the truth.
I know it may very well depend on the speaker's age/gender etc. and am not expecting one-or-the-other answers. This question is for more of a statistics purpose. Do you think the statement above is true (based on your usage)?
"Go shut the door" was fully recognisable to me (an Irish-English speaker) and didn't strike me as unusual or sounding particularly American, British, un-American or un-British.
So from experience, I would say it's not peculiar to either.
Of course, 1 is not a statistically valid sample. Since it's a rare enough expression in full though, I decided to look at "Go find out" vs "Go and find out", as it should be more common, especially in non-fiction cases.
A corpus search finds the fuller form ("Go and...") to have been more common in both British and American English, the shorter form to be found in both. In the last couple of decades the shorter form has become more popular in British English but remains in the minority, and so much more popular in American English as to rival the fuller form.
Of course, the corpus only examines written English, and I would suspect that the shorter form's popularity would be greater in spoken English than written. If this was the case then the difference in en-GB* and en-US might be not so much that Americans use it more than Britons, than that Britons are more likely to consider it too informal for at least some written use - it's impossible to say.
*Incidentally, what is with google using "eng_us" and "eng_gb", as if we didn't have an agreed-upon system favouring ISO 639-1 over ISO 639-2 on the web for the last 17 years?
There will always be over-zealous pedants, but there's certainly no grammatical rule to say that "and" should be included in such constructions.
However, I think there's some justification for OP's perception that (particularly in recent decades) Americans are more likely not to include it. Compare this (US corpus) chart from Google Books...
...with the UK version
It seems to me those charts suggest usage was broadly similar until about 1930-1940, after which it became increasingly common for US speakers to omit "and". Purely my own opinion, but I think black Americans were always very much less likely to use "and" here. There was never anything identifiably "wrong" in this; the cultural admixture occasioned by WW2 (and movies with speech) simply caused the habit to spread through the general population more.
