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."
5 Key excerpts on "Imperative Mood"
eBook - ePub- Fidèle Mpiranya(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...11 Imperative and subjunctive moods Unlike the indicative mood, which typically declare facts, the imperative and subjunctive moods are generally non-declarative. In Swahili, the Imperative Mood expresses strong requests in the affirmative form, while the subjunctive mood expresses negative requests, as well as weak and indirect requests. The subjunctive is also used in subordinate clauses to imply the connotation of “possibility”, as opposed to “factual statements” that use verbs in the infinitive form or in the indicative mood. 11.1. Imperative Mood When addressing one person, the imperative is formed by removing the infinitive marker of the verb. This simple form of the imperative is used without an object pronoun or any other prefix, as shown in (1). When the verb has an object pronoun, the singular imperative uses the marker -e, as in (2). However, the presence of an object pronoun does not affect the final vowel of foreign verbs ending in /i/, /e/, or /u/, as seen below in (3). The /i e u/ endings are part of the root of the verb and, therefore, are not affected by conjugation, contrary to the regular stem final -a. In the plural, the imperative is expressed with the final marker -eni for regular verbs, and -ni for irregular verb stems that end with the vowels /i/, /e/, or /u/, as shown respectively in (4) and (5). In both singular and plural, there exists an emphatic form of the imperative which uses the marker ka- (6). With regular verbs, this type of imperative requires the use of the final -e instead of the final -a in the singular (6a), similar to the imperative with an object pronoun seen in (2). (6) a. Kafungue mlango! “(Go) open the door!” b. Kafungueni mlango! “(Go) open the door (you all)!” c. Kajibu/Kajibuni maswali yoye! “(Go) answer all the questions/you all” The Imperative Mood has no specific negative form and, therefore, strong negative requests use the negative subjunctive form seen below in 11.3. 11.2...
eBook - ePub- C. I. Lewis, John Lange, John Lange(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- SUNY Press(Publisher)
...But such renditions would not, of course, be generally and correctly interpretable as “commands.” We may still say that, divested of its metonymic extensions, and corrected for inexact elisions, the indicative is the mood of assignment to the representational content expressed the status of that which is actual, fixed, inalterably as it is and not otherwise. In a similarly general fashion, we may say that the basic sense of the imperative is the entertainment of the thought-of content of representation as future determinable and as a commitment to be taken. Some represented and referred-to state of affairs is to be brought about. But at once two semantic cautions are to be observed. First, though our main interest here is in doing, in physical bringing about, we must not forget that directable thinking is itself an activity and has its own critical directives, which constitute the topic of logic and epistemology—the ethics of believing. Such governable thinking may also and literally fall under the head of the future determinable, but in a somewhat different sense from that with which doing is concerned. Second, we must not confuse the communication of a content expressed in the Imperative Mood with the imposing of a requirement to do upon the addressee. Imparting to another the imperativeness of something to be done is not—or not universally—commanding the addressee to do it, or even urging or exhorting him to do it. For example, one who instructs another how something must be done if the doing of it is to succeed in its aim is not laying on him a command to do anything, or, even if he does something relevant, to do it as instructed. The instructor may have no desires with respect to what his advisee shall do or how he shall act, and might be better pleased if he would stop bothering a busy man and go make his own mistakes. But the discourse of such instruction will fall in the Imperative Mood...
- Gary Kemp(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...In this chapter, we will explore its initial forms and motivations and consider some applications. • Mood and Force Revisited In the Introduction, we distinguished meaning from force. Semantics concerns the former, and pragmatics is largely concerned with the latter. The sentences in Table 7.1, we said, express the same proposition but would normally be used to express it with different force. The grammatical differences are differences of mood. Table 7.1 Mood and force Sentence Mood Force (that would standardly be expressed by that mood) Proposition (content, as it is often called in this context) You are going to eat raw fish. Indicative/Declarative Assertion That you are going to eat raw fish. Are you going to eat raw fish? Interrogative Question That you are going to eat raw fish. Eat raw fish! * Imperative Command That you are going to eat raw fish. * The convention in English is that the subject of the command is tacit and is the intended audience. It is natural to think that force is at least partly a psychological matter: in central cases, a person asks a question or makes an assertion only if they intend to. By contrast, the role of mood is clearly a matter of convention : for example, there is a convention whereby the use of the interrogative mood indicates to the listener that the speaker is asking a question, i.e. expressing the proposition with interrogative force. In English, the interrogative mood is typically accomplished by reversing the order of subject and verb. But the relation of mood and force is somewhat fluid. The use of mood is not the only way to indicate force. The mere uttering of a sentence in a given mood is not sufficient for saying something with the force standardly conveyed by that mood. One can utter ‘Eat raw fish!’ without commanding, enjoining or suggesting anything. It is also not necessary. We can ask a question by using the indicative mood, usually by varying our tone of voice: using a rising intonation...
- Hans-Jorg Busch(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...7 The function or systematic grammatical meaning of the indicative, subjunctive, and Imperative Moods in Spanish By 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. 7.1 The formal distinction between indicative and subjunctive in Spanish The basic mood in Spanish is the indicative. Its verb endings and uses distinguish it from the subjunctive and the imperative. The 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...
eBook - ePub- Goold Brown(Author)
- 2004(Publication Date)
- Perlego(Publisher)
...MOODS. Moods [229] are different forms of the verb, each of which expresses the being, action, or passion, in some particular manner. There are five moods; the Infinitive, the Indicative, the Potential, the Subjunctive, and the Imperative. The Infinitive mood is that form of the verb, which expresses the being, action, or passion, in an unlimited manner, and without person or number: as, "To die,—to sleep ;—To sleep !—perchance, to dream! " The Indicative mood is that form of the verb, which simply indicates or declares a thing: as, I write ; you know : or asks a question; as, "Do you know? "—" Know ye not?" The Potential mood is that form of the verb which expresses the power, liberty, possibility, or necessity, of the being, action, or passion: as, "I can walk ; he may ride ; we must go." The Subjunctive mood is that form of the verb, which represents the being, action, or passion, as conditional, doubtful, and. contingent: as, "If thou go, see that thou offend not."—"See thou do it not."— Rev., xix, 10. The Imperative Mood is that form of the verb which is used in commanding, exhorting, entreating, or permitting: as, " Depart thou."—"Be comforted."—" Forgive me."—" Go in peace." OBSERVATIONS. OBS. 1.—The Infinitive mood is so called in opposition to the other moods, in which the verb is said to be finite. In all the other moods, the verb has a strict connexion, and necessary agreement in person and number, with some subject or nominative, expressed or understood; but the infinitive is the mere verb, without any such agreement, and has no power of completing sense with a noun. In the nature of things, however, all being, action, or passion, not contemplated abstractly as a thing, belongs to something that is, or acts, or is acted upon. Accordingly infinitives have, in most instances, a reference to some subject of this kind; though their grammatical dependence connects them more frequently with some other term...
