Languages & Linguistics
Imperative Mood
The imperative mood is a grammatical mood used to express commands, requests, or direct suggestions. It is typically used to convey a sense of urgency or authority. In English, imperative sentences often begin with a base form of the verb and do not include a subject, as in "Close the door."
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eBook - PDF- Mark Jary, Mikhail Kissine(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
PART I The data 1 What is the Imperative Mood? This book is about the semantics and pragmatics of imperatives. That is to say, it is about the interaction of linguistic meaning and contextual factors, including speaker intentions, in the interpretation of utter- ances of a particular type of linguistic form. To undertake to write such a book is to presuppose that the term ‘imperative’ picks out a distinct linguistic type with a meaning consistent across different instantiations, such that interesting things can be said about its contri- bution to utterance interpretation. In this chapter, we justify this assumption by showing that, cross-linguistically, the ‘imperative form’ can be identified by virtue of its function in communication. For now, we will just say that this function is to signal the performance of directive speech acts such as commands, orders, requests and pleas. However, as we will see in later chapters, the uses to which the type of linguistic form we are investigating can be put goes beyond this narrow range. Moreover, we will also see that identifying the form by virtue of this function in no way commits us, nor any other theorist, to claiming that this function is encoded by that form. In any interesting sense of ‘encode’, if a form encodes a function, then it does more than merely indicate that that function is its most prototypical use. Rather, if a form encodes a function, then no literal and serious use of that form is possible without its performing the function at hand, so that comprehension of the form is nothing more than relating it to its typical function. This point is very important, as we will see again and again that one of the central issues about the imperative is whether or not every literal use of it necessarily corres- ponds to the performance of a directive speech act.
eBook - PDF- Paulus Kieviet(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Language Science Press(Publisher)
10 Mood and negation 10.1 Introduction Mood concerns the pragmatic status of a sentence, the speech act performed by utter- ing the sentence: a sentence can either be a statement (declarative mood), command (Imperative Mood) or question (interrogative mood) (Dixon 2010a: 95; Payne 1997: 294). A fourth (minor) speech act is the exclamative, in which the speaker gives an affective response to a fact presumed to be known by the hearer (König & Siemund 2007: 316). This chapter deals with mood; sections §10.2–10.4 discuss imperative, interrogative and exclamative constructions, respectively. Furthermore, this chapter discusses nega- tion (§10.5). 10.2 Imperative Mood 10.2.1 The imperative Imperatives are expressed by two preverbal markers, which also have an aspectual value: the contiguity marker ka (§7.2.6) and the imperfective marker e (§7.2.5). Ka is used for actions which are to be performed immediately; ka with imperative function is glossed imp(erative). E is used for actions which are to be performed in the future or which are to be performed repeatedly or habitually, as well as for general instructions; e with imperative function is glossed exh(ortative). Ka and e can be characterised as marking direct and indirect injunctions, respectively. A few examples of both markers: (1) Ka imp e ꞌa go_out ki to haho outside ka imp to ꞌo take mai hither hai ins vai water mā ꞌaku ben.1sg.a mo for unu. drink ‘Go outside and bring water for me to drink.’ [R229.231] (2) Ka imp uru enter mai hither kōrua 2pl ki to roto. inside ‘Come in (said to two people).’ [R229.261] (3) Ka imp ꞌara wake_up mai hither koe, 2sg e voc nua Mum ē. voc ‘Wake up, Mum.’ [R229.315] 10 Mood and negation (4) Ana irr tomo go_ashore kōrua 2pl ki to ꞌuta, inland e exh u ꞌi look atu away kōrua 2pl ki to te art motu. islet ‘When you go ashore, watch towards the islet.’ [Ley-2-02.005] (5) E exh hāpa ꞌo care_for kōrua 2pl i acc a prop Puakiva.
eBook - PDF- Martin Durrell(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
14 Mood: the imperative and the subjunctive The grammatical category of MOOD makes it possible for speakers to signal their attitude to what they are saying, in particular to indicate whether what they are saying is to be understood as a fact, a possibility or a command. German has three moods, the IN DICATIVE , the IMPERATIVE and the SUBJUN CTIVE , and these are shown by special verb endings or forms. Table 14.1 shows some typical examples of verb forms in the three moods. TABLE 14.1 The moods of German Indicative Subjunctive Imperative sie ist sie kauft sie kam sie wird wandern sie sei sie kaufe sie käme sie würde wandern sei! kaufe! kommt! wandern Sie! All the forms of the indicative and the imperative in the active voice are given in Tables 10.10– 10.13 , and in the passive in Tables 10.14 and 10.15 . The formation of the subjunctiv e mood is explained in section 10.5 and all the forms are shown in Tables 10.16 – 10.22 . • The indicative mood presents what the speaker is saying as a fact The indicative is the most frequent mood, used in all kinds of statements and in questions – in effect in all contexts where speakers do not want to give a command or to signal that what they are saying may not be the fact. As it is the ‘normal’ or default mood, its use is not treated specifically in this chapter. • The Imperative Mood is used in commands and requests As we normally address these to the person we are talking to, the Imperative Mood only has special forms in the second person (i.e. the ‘you’-form). The uses of the imperative in German are treated in section 14.1 , together with the other ways of giving commands and requests. • The subjunctive mood presents what the speaker is saying as not necessarily true If we use the subjunctive , we are characterizing an activity, an event or a state as unreal , possible or, at best, not necessarily true (hence its old German name of Möglichkeitsform ).
eBook - PDF- A.R. Coupe(Author)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
In some contexts, 390 Imperatives the scope of Imperative Mood can extend over associated dependent clauses as well; examples of this are discussed in §10.3.1 below. Intonation is not systematically exploited for the prosodic marking of any type of imperative clause. 10.2.1. Positive imperative Positive Imperative Mood is marked by the imperative inflection -(a) on the verb stem. While the default reference of imperatives is the second person, a personal pronoun or other deictic nominal such as personal name or a kinship term can be used in topic function to clarify the reference of a command. The personal name in the following example is used as a form of vocative. (10.6) nuks ns pa – nà aki n k . nuks nsa -pà nà a-ki n k a-a PN -M 2 SG NRL -house ALL ascend+come-IMP ‘Noksensangba – come up to the house.’ a a a Being a wholly dependent-marking language at the clause level (Nichols 1986), Mongsen does not formally distinguish number or person in verbal inflection; consequently context must be relied upon to determine whether a verb marked by -(a) should be interpreted as having hortative first person or imperative second person reference. First person singular reference in commands is highly unlikely, but first person plural reference is occasionally encountered in texts. In the sentence of (10.7) below, for example, there is no morphology by which a hortative mood separate from Imperative Mood might be identified. Yet in the context of the source narrative, it is clear that the speaker is exhorting the addressee to accompany him on the return journey home, and not merely ordering the addressee to approach him. (10.7) “t mpa , , aki n t huwa ù,” t saw t u. t m-pà à-a a-ki n t huwa-ù friend-M come-IMP NRL -house ALL emerge-IMM t sa-ù t u thus say. PST -DEC DIST ‘“Come friend, [we] will go home,” [he] said like that.’ Imperatives encode third person reference relatively rarely. Jussive-type commands tend to occur with overt third person noun phrase arguments,
eBook - PDF- Aynur Abish(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Harrassowitz Verlag(Publisher)
They do not define relations between participants and the realization of the action. They are thus not agent-oriented, i.e. objective moods that denote the will of the subject referent, but rather subjective moods. This does not, however, mean that they are necessarily speaker-oriented in the sense of expressing the speaker’s own will. The desiderability may also be conceived of as impersonal, representing a general or higher will” (Johanson 2009: 489). In some traditional Turkic grammars, the paradigms are merged into a so-called “imperative” paradigm that includes the imperative and the third-person volunta-tive, or into a so-called “optative” paradigm that also includes the first-person vo-luntative. Kazakh grammars (Geng et al. 1999: 234, KG 2002: 513, Zhang 2004: 412, Mamanov 2007: 101, MKL 2010: 468) describe the “imperative” as a com-plete paradigm including voluntative as following table illustrates. 11 See also Csató (2012b) on the sustainability of bound morphology in Karaim. © 2016, Otto Harrassowitz GmbH & Co. KG, Wiesbaden ISBN Print: 9783447106269 # ISBN E-Book: 9783447195287 Moods 19 Table 1. The so-called “imperative” paradigm Singular Plural First person -(A 2 )yI 2 n -(A 2 )yI 2 K 2 Second person Ø, -(I 2 ) ŋ I 2 z (polite) -(I 2 ) ŋ dA 2 r , -(I 2 ) ŋ I 2 zdA 2 r (polite) Third person -sI 2 n -sI 2 n There are considerable formal and functional differences between the volitional moods. However, it is important to remember that moods expressing volition are “subtle categories, subject to strong vacillation. It is impossible to establish origi-nal, sharply defined spheres of use from which the various usages can be derived. All attempts to determine the fundamental notions originally attached to the indi-vidual moods have failed” (Johanson 2014: 22). Imperative Mood Inventory of forms Affirmative As in many other languages, the singular form of the imperative in Kazakh is ho-monymous with the bare verbal stem, e.g.
eBook - ePub- Hans-Jorg Busch, Hans-Jörg Busch(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
The function or systematic grammatical meaning of the indicative, subjunctive, and Imperative Moods in SpanishBy defining moods as the formal and systematic manifestations of modality, they are characterized as grammatical structures with a general modal meaning. This meaning cannot be explained in philosophical, semantic or pragmatic terms, but as a notion that corresponds to all the specific systematic manifestation in the language. Neither can it be defined as triggered by the meaning of other elements or just as the product of distribution rules.
The basic mood in Spanish is the indicative. Its verb endings and uses distinguish it from the subjunctive and the imperative.7.1 The formal distinction between indicative and subjunctive in SpanishThe formal distinction between the present indicative and subjunctive is minimal. It is just based on the distinction between the phonemes versus allophones /a/, /e/ and /i/. The same goes for the difference between the imperfect and the imperfect subjunctive (past subjunctive) of regular -ar verbs that are only distinguished by the phonemes [b] and [r]. This is similar to how we use phonemes to distinguish words with different meaning, such as fAn and fUn, bOOt and bOAt, haPPy and HaRRy , etc.Therefore, it is important for teachers to train their students to hear the phonetic difference between [a] and [e] and to point out the importance of this phonological distinction in the Spanish language.The subjunctive paradigm is in many ways more limited and restricted when compared to the indicative:- There are only two simple subjunctive conjugations – if we ignore the differences between the two imperfect subjunctive forms hablara/hablase :1 the present and past subjunctive. However, there are five simple indicative conjugations: the present, preterit, imperfect, future, conditional indicative.2 (We can neglect the analytic forms consisting of haber
eBook - PDF- Kate Scott, Billy Clark, Robyn Carston(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
113 Part II Pragmatics and Linguistic Issues 114 115 115 8 Mood and the Analysis of Imperative Sentences Mark Jary and Mikhail Kissine 8.1 Introduction Wilson and Sperber’s ‘Mood and the analysis of non-declarative sentences’ (1988a) is an important and influential contribution to the literature on the semantics of imperative and interrogative sentences, not least because it highlights non-directive uses of the imperative, such as audienceless cases like (8.1) and predetermined cases like (8.2): (8.1) Please don’t rain. (8.2) Please be out (muttered by a child sent to apologise to someone). Wilson and Sperber’s account of imperative semantics seeks to accommo- date such uses by positing that the encoded meaning of imperative sentences presents the proposition expressed as potential and desirable, without speci- fying to whom the desirability applies. This enables Wilson and Sperber to account for cases where directive force is evident as instances where the prop- osition expressed is desirable to the speaker, but without thereby postulating directive force as the encoded meaning of the imperative. 1 It also enables them to deal with uses of the imperative to give advice (8.3) and permission (8.4) as cases where the state of affairs described by the utterance is desirable to the hearer rather than to the speaker, hence avoiding the problems faced by theories that treat the imperative as necessarily entailing the expression of the speaker’s desire (see e.g. Harnish 1994). (8.3) Take paracetamol. (8.4) Go ahead. Marry her. But you’ll regret it. But what does it mean, in speech-act terms, to present a proposition as desir- able and potential? In answering this question, Wilson and Sperber introduce the generic speech-act descriptor ‘telling to’: to tell somebody to P is to present 1 There are a number of reasons for not building directive force into the imperative’s semantics. See Jary and Kissine (2014), and references therein, for discussion.
- Sebastian Kempgen, Peter Kosta, Tilman Berger, Karl Gutschmidt, Sebastian Kempgen, Peter Kosta, Tilman Berger, Karl Gutschmidt(Authors)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
20. Imperative Mood 237 Tafel, Karin (1999): „Personalität und die Kategorie der Person beim Verb“. // Jachnow, Helmut et al. (ed.). Personalität und Person . Wiesbaden. 233 254. Vykyp ě l, Bohumil (2002): „Zum Schicksal der Dualformen (ein tschechisch-lettisch-litauisch-sor-bischer Vergleich mit einigen allgemeinen Bemerkungen)“. // Acta Linguistica Lithuanica XLVII. 103 107. Wingender, Monika (1995): Zeit und Sprache. Temporalität und ihre Repräsentation im Lexikon des Russischen. Wiesbaden. Wingender, Monika (1999): „Personalität und Deixis“. // Jachnow, Helmut et al. (eds.) Personalität und Person . Wiesbaden. 59 75. Winter, Una (1987): Zum Problem der Kategorie der Person im Russischen . München. Xrakovskij, V. S. (1990): „Vzaimodejstvie grammati č eskix kategorij glagola (opyt analiza)“. // Vo-prosy jazykoznanija 5. 18 36. Monika Wingender, Gießen (Deutschland) 20. Imperative Mood 1. Second-person Singular Imperative Forms 2. Second-person Dual Synthetic Imperative Forms 3. Second-person Plural Imperative Forms 4. First-person Singular Analytical Imperative Forms 5. First-person Dual Imperative Forms 6. First-person Plural Imperative Forms 7. Third-person Singular Analytical Imperative Forms 8. Third-person Dual Analytical Imperative Forms 9. Third-person Plural Analytical Imperative Forms 10. Negative Imperative Forms 11. Literature (selected) Abstract The article considers the structure of the imperative paradigms and describes the deriva-tion of various imperative forms synthetic vs. analytical, positive vs. negative, imperfec-tive vs. perfective, singular vs. dual vs. plural in Slavonic languages. In the Slavonic languages, there are synthetic and analytical imperative forms with the prescriptive meaning. Synthetic forms are derived from corresponding first-person singular, second-person singular or third-person plural present stems without an end-ing.
eBook - PDFA Grammar and Dictionary of Tayap
The Life and Death of a Papuan Language
- Don Kulick, Angela Terrill(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501512209-007 7 Mood Mood is the name given to the ways a language grammatically encodes a speaker’s attitude toward an utterance. How does a speaker issue a command or express a wish? Voice a doubt or assert a fact? English accomplishes many of these kinds of speech acts with modal verbs like ‘can’, ‘will’ and ‘must’. Tayap expresses them with particular kinds of verbal morphology. The declarative or indicative mood (i.e. making a statement) has been presented this grammar. It is not morphologi-cally marked in Tayap. The interrogative mood is expressed with the interrogative clitic =ke , discussed in Section 3.9. Other moods that are indicated through particular morphology on a verb are as follows: – Subjunctive (including imperative, jussive, indirect commands and wishes) (Section 7.1) – Prohibitive (Section 7.2) – Admonitive (Section 7.3) – Intentional (Section 7.4) – Benefactive (Section 7.5) Other free-form mood particles are also discussed (Section 7.6). Note that the realis/irrealis distinction which is fundamental to so much of Tayap’s verbal morphology is considered in this work to be a status distinction rather than a mood distinction, and as such is discussed in Chapters 5 and 6 rather than here. Note also that the realis/irrealis distinction is not available to non-indicative moods apart from the benefactive. 7.1 Subjunctive (sbj) Tayap has a distinct set of verb forms that encode a speaker’s desire that another person do something. The underlying syntactic structure in which a subjunctive appears is a subordinate clause (i.e. ‘I want that X do Y’), but a separate set of subjunctive forms can also occur in a main clause. Since those forms only occur in indirect commands, they are discussed below in Section 7.1.5. The inflectional pattern for intransitive and transitive verbs in the subjunc-tive mood is as follows:
eBook - PDF- Asier Alcázar, Mario Saltarelli(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
Hence, on closer inspection, languages claimed not to have an imperative clause may in fact feature one, like Vietnamese. Although the claim that some languages do not possess an imperative clause is sometimes premature, this is not tantamount to saying that all languages must have an imperative clause (pace Xrakovskij; König and Siemund). It seems plausible for languages to resort to indirection in lieu of an imperative. D&I can be interpreted as directive speech acts, as in “it’s cold in here” (potentially implied meaning: “please, turn on the heating!”) or “is it cold in here?” (poten- tially implied meaning: “please, turn on the heating!”; see Levinson 1983: Ch. 5; Newmeyer 1986: Chs. 4–5). More generally, context renders speech act dis- tinctions in syntax superfluous, as basic sentence types need not be interpreted literally (cf. Sadock and Zwicky 1985; but see 2.5). That said, most surveyed languages have been found to possess an imperative type. Further examination of languages that seemingly lack such a type is necessary. At the same time, there is morphological evidence and evidence from first language acquisition that suggests that the imperative clause is universal. König and Siemund (2007) and Xrakovskij (2001) touch on an important generalization. Imperative clauses are less marked than D&I. But this lack of Confirmed generalizations 17 markedness may follow from the morphological properties of the language. Van der Auwera and Lejeune (2005b) and van der Auwera (2010) find that having dedicated imperative verb forms is the norm (>75%). And this num- ber does not include other means of identifying imperative sentences (e.g., Maori, Vietnamese; optionality of the subject in languages where subjects are obligatory, prosody, etc.). Importantly, many of the languages that depart from the norm are analytic. Hence, the general characteristics of the morphology of a language may be responsible for the apparent lack of an imperative type.
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