The Imperative Mood

§ 247. The imperative mood represents an action as a com­mand, urging, request, exhortation addressed to one’s interlocutor(s). It is a direct expression of one’s will. Therefore it is much more ‘subjective’ than the indicative mood. Its modal meaning is very strong and distinct.

§ 248. The imperative mood is morphologically the least developed of all moods. In fact, the grammeme write, know, warn, search, do, etc. is the only one regularly met in speech. The ‘continuous’ and ‘passive’ opposites of this grammeme (be writing, be searching, etc; be known, be warned, etc.) are very rare.

E. g. В e always s e a r c h i n g for new sensations. (Wilde).

Be w a r n e d in time, mend your manner. (Shaw).

§ 249. Though the system of the ‘imperative’ mood does not contain ‘person’ opposemes, it cannot be said that there is no meaning of ‘person’ in the imperative mood grammemes On the contrary, all of them are united by the meaning of ‘second person’ because it is always to his interlocutor (the second person) that the speaker addresses his order or request expressed with the help of imperative mood forms. Thus the meaning of «second person» is a lexico-grammatical meaning common to all the imperative mood grammemes. This meaning makes it unnecessary to use the subject you with predicate verbs in the imperative mood. But sometimes you is used for emphasis, as in Don’t you do it.

§ 250. Some linguists are of the opinion that Modern English possesses analytical forms of the imperative mood for the first and the third person built up with the help of the semantically weakened unstressed let, as in L e t him c o m e, L e t us g o, etc.

G.N.Vorontsova gives a detailed analysis of these constructions to prove that they are analytical forms of the imperative:

1) Sentences like L e t’ s l e t the newspaper reporters take a crack at her (Gardner) prove that unlike the second let which is a notional verb the first let is devoid of lexical meaning.

2) It is quite possible to treat the objective case pronouns in the sentences Let т e be frank, Let h i m look out, Let t h e т both see, as the subjects.

3) An order can be addressed not only to the second person but to the third person as well.

Compare: Someone m a k e an offer – and quick! (Barr).

L e t someone m a k e an offer

4) The recognition of the let-constructions as the analytical forms of the imperative would make the imperative a developed morphological system.

All these considerations are serious enough. Still there are some objections to these constructions being regarded as analytical forms of the imperative.

1. There is some difference in meaning between Go! and Let him go. In the second case no direct urging is expressed as it is typical of the imperative mood.

2. Cases like Do not let us ever allude to those times, with the word-morpheme do, alongside of such sentences as Let it not be doubted that they were nice, well-behaved girls (Bennett), without the word-morpheme do, show that let has not yet established itself as a word-morpheme of the imperative mood.

To be on the safe side, we shall assume that the let-constructions are analytical words in the making.

B.Ilyish, The Structure of Modern English, p. 76-81

Date: 2015-02-28; view: 1077