THE IMPERATIVE

The imperative mood in English is represented by one form only, viz. come (!), without any suffix or ending.

It differs from all other moods in several important points. It has no person, number, tense, or aspect distinctions, and, which is the main thing, it is limited in its use to one type of sentence only, viz. imperative sentences. Most usually a verb in the imperative has no pronoun acting as subject. However, the pronoun may be used in emotional speech, as in the following example: «But, Tessie—» he pleaded, going towards her. «You leave me alone!» she cried out loudly. (E.CALDWELL) These are essential peculiarities distinguishing the imperative, and they have given rise to doubts as to whether the imperative can be numbered among the moods at all. This of course depends on what we mean by mood. If we accept the Definition of mood given above there would seem to be no ground to deny that the imperative is a mood. The definition does not say anything about the possibility of using a form belonging to a modal category in one or more types of sentences: that syntactical problem is not a problem of defining mood. If we were to define mood (and, indeed, the other verbal categories) in terms of syntactical use, and to mention the ability of being used in various types of sentences as prerequisite for a category to be acknowledged as mood, things would indeed be different and the imperative would have to go. Such a view is possible but it has not so far been developed by any scholar and until that is convincingly done there appears no ground to exclude the imperative.

A serious difficulty connected with the imperative is the absence of any specific morphological characteristics: with all verbs, including the verb be, it coincides with the infinitive, and in all verbs, except be, it also coincides with the present indicative apart from the 3rd person singular. Even the absence of a subject pronoun you, which would be its syntactical characteristic, is not a reliable feature at all, as sentences like You sit here! occur often enough. Meaning alone may not seem sufficient ground for establishing a grammatical category. Thus, no fully convincing solution of the problem has yet been found.

Date: 2015-02-28; view: 672