Learn English – ‘Go to sleep’ vs ‘Go and sleep’

british-englishexpressionsgrammarprepositions

I just had a linguistics test (it's called UKLO) that measures you're ability to problem solve and translate languages you know nothing about.

For one of my translation answers I wrote 'Don't go and sleep!'. Is this incorrect, or just a dialectal (Northern English) way of speaking. Should it be 'Don't go to sleep!'. I usually replace 'to' with 'and' in verb constructions like this, for example: 'I'm gonna go and leave now.' instead of 'I'm going to leave now.'

Thanks,

Sam

Best Answer

"Go and X" is an idiom (which some people object to, saying it should be "go to X"). This can be used with many different verbs, but not normally with "sleep" (but see below).

Separately, "go to sleep" is a very common idiom meaning "fall asleep"; and as is commonly the case with idioms the words can't be substituted by synonyms or equivalent structures: neither "go and sleep" or "go to slumber" works.

There are contexts where you can say "go and sleep", where the "go" has independent meaning: "You can go and sleep in the spare room"; but that has a different meaning from "You can go to sleep in the spare room".

Related Topic