| Description and source of typological name (English) |
Imperatives can be defined as constructions of grammar that typically express a state of affairs as desirable by the speaker and that furthermore appeal to the hearer(s) to fulfill the desire. Thus, sentence (1) is an imperative. It has the meaning just described, and the construction type is defined in terms of grammar, especially syntax (the clause lacks a subject and it starts with a finite verb) and, less so, morphology (the bare form of the verb is highly polyfunctional).
(1) go home now
A point of controversy is whether imperatives are exclusively second person.
The prototypical impera-tive was claimed to involve an appeal to the hearer to fulfill a desire of the speaker. In the most typical imperative, the hearer is him- or herself in control of the desired state of affairs and can thus fulfill the desire in a straightforward way.
Just as languages differ as to whether they have grammaticalized more or less dedicated second-person imperatives, they also differ as to whether they have grammaticalized non-second-person con- struction
Auwera van der, J. Imperatives // Brown Keith (ed.) - Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. Elsevier, 2005. P. 565-566. |
