Imperative mood
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The imperative mood expresses direct commands or requests in most Indo-European languages. It’s also used to signal a prohibition, permission or any other kind of exhortation.
English’s imperative is formed simply by using the verb's plain form (bare infinitive). The subject of the sentence can only be you (the second person). Other languages as Latin, French and German have several inflected imperative forms, which can vary according to grammatical categories like:
- Distinct conjugation patterns;
- Grammatical number;
- Distinct grammatical persons.
For instance, Latin regular forms can be:
- amã (singular); amãte (plural) ← from infinitive amãre, to 'love'
- monē (singular); monēte (plural) ← from monēre, to 'warn'
- audī (singular); audīte (plural) ← from audīre, to 'hear'
- cape (singular); capite (plural) ← from capĕre, to 'take'
- rege (singular); regite (plural) ← from regĕre, to 'reign'.
This richness of forms can be useful for a better understanding, particularly because no subject pronoun is normally specified with the imperative.
[edit] Use of imperative mood
The use of imperative mood can easily be considered offensive or inappropriate in social situations due to universal recognized politeness rules. Therefore, exhortations are often formulated indirectly, as questions or assertions:
- Could you come here for a moment?
- I beg you to stop
and not as commands like in the following examples:
- Come here.
- Stop!
As a matter of fact, politeness strategies (for instance, indirect speech acts) can be much more appropriate in order not to threaten a conversational partner in his needs of self-determination and territory: according to Brown-Levinson 1978, the partner's negative face shouldn't be threatened. As a result, the imperative mood isn't necessarily the most used form to express a request or prohibition.
On the other hand, the risk of threatening someone’s needs of self-determination isn’t always really serious. The imperative mood's appropriateness depends on several factors like psychological and social relationships, as well as the speaker’s basic communicative intention (illocutionary force). For example, the speaker may have the simple intention to offer something, to wish or permit something, or just to apologize, and not to manipulate his conversational partner. In these cases, no restriction will be placed on the use of imperative:
- Come to the party tomorrow!
- Just smoke if you want
- Have a nice trip!
- Excuse me!
[edit] References
- Austin, J. L. How to do things with words, Oxford, Clarendon Press 1962.
- Brown, P.-Levinson, S., ”Universals in language use”, in E. N. Goody (ed.), Questions and Politeness, Cambridge and London, 1978, Cambridge University Press: 56-310.
- Schmecken, H. Orbis Romanus, Paderborn, Schöningh 1975, ISBN 3 506 10330.cs:Imperativ
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