Come and see us again.
Come to see us again.
What's the difference in their meaning? My translator see no difference. Are they completely the same in their meaning and usage?
Phrase Usage – ‘Come and See Us’ vs. ‘Come to See Us’
phrase-usage
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Best Answer
The following is the short answer and simple answer to what I think the question is.
These phrases generally mean the same thing, but the first is more informal and the second is what is appropriate for formal usage. If this answers your question, don't bother to read the rest of this long explanation.
The longer and more complex answer to the question is that there are actually at least five different expressions at issue with different nuances that sometimes overlap.
The first use of "come to" you should understand is that it can express a result that happens to a person. An example is: "When you live in that city long enough, you will come to see the advantages of urban living." In this usage, you must use the preposition. The meaning of "come to" is close to "eventually and naturally," as in "you will eventually and naturally see the advantages." It emphasizes that you think the result will inevitably happen.
The next usage to understand would be to use two verbs in separate sentences or clauses, as in "You will come to our city and will see us again." Here the relationship between "coming" and "seeing" is left open to context and the imagination. It could just be a prediction that one event will happen completely independently of the other, on the same occasion or maybe even separate occasions. This meaning can still posssibly be the same if you omit some of the words and just say "You will come and see us again"; however, note the next usage.
The next usage is "You will come and see us again." This seems identical to the last, but has no extra words. The relationship between seeing and coming is technically left open, but leaving out additional words between the two verbs usually strongly implies that they are inseparable parts of a single event with whatever relation between the parts that is natural to assume. Saying "come and see" with so few extra words almost always means that you are telling the person to come for that purpose.
In this third structure, the implication is that the purpose of coming will lead to seeing the person again without stating that this is necessarily the purpose. It would be quite natural to use this structure if the purpose in coming included other goals and "seeing us again" was only an additional benefit. For instance, if you say: "I'm going to go to the store and buy some milk." You assert that at least one reason for your trip is to buy milk, but you may intend to buy other things as well. Since this structure has some vagueness associated with it, it is less usual in formal writing. Also, since this structure doesn't exist in French and Latin, traditional grammarians and those who follow their views look upon it with disfavor as a supposed illogical equivalent of the following more precise expression.
Historically, English usage favored paratactic structures with sentence elements used side by side and joined by coordinating conjunctions (e.g., "come and see"). Under the influence of French and Latin, English now has many hypotactic constructions where sentence elements are embedded in each other or made subordinate to each other (e.g., "come to see"). "Clear" and "direct" writing in English tends to favor the former approach. "Technical" and "sophisticated" writing tends to favor the latter approach.