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  • Let's go help repair his car.

How can three verbs go in a row like this, without the subject?

I thought grammatically it should be:

  • Let's go help him repair his car.
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    They form a little choo-choo train. That's the technical term. Think of this this way: go { valid complement {valid complement} } A plain infinitive or plain-infinitive-headed clause are both valid complements of help. And help (and its complement) is a valid complement of go. And he might not be doing any of the repairs.
    – TimR
    Commented Sep 3, 2018 at 17:29

1 Answer 1

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Both of those sentences are grammatical in American English. (It could also be altered to create a natural sounding sentence with four consecutive verbs: We will go help repair his car.)

  • "Go" here is equivalent to "go and" (see definition 2c here). "Go <verb>" is marked as American English.
  • "Help" doesn't need an object. "Help <verb>" is equivalent to "help to <verb>" (see definition 1 here, under "no object").
  • "Repair" shouldn't need an explanation because there's nothing special about it here. Many (most? all?) verbs would fit grammatically here (but not all verbs would make sense). In theory, if you were helping someone to go help do something, you could say "let's go help go help" (and it would be also technically grammatical to repeat this infinitely); however nobody would actually say this (except as a joke).

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