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The imperative mood (abbreviated imp) is a grammatical mood that expresses direct commands or requests. It is also used to signal a prohibition, permission or any other kind of exhortation.

Morphology

The English imperative is formed simply by using the bare infinitive form of the verb. Be is the only verb whose infinitive form is different from the second-person present indicative form. The subject of the sentence can only be you (the second person). Other languages such as Latin, French and German have several inflected imperative forms, which can vary according to grammatical categories like:

• Distinct conjugation patterns;
• Grammatical number;
• Distinct grammatical persons.

For instance, Latin regular forms can be:

• amā (singular); amāte (plural) ← from infinitive amāre, to 'love'
• monē (singular); monēte (plural) ← from monēre, to 'advise' or 'warn'
• audī (singular); audīte (plural) ← from audīre, to 'hear'
• cape (singular); capite (plural) ← from capĕre, to 'take'
• rege (singular); regite (plural) ← from regĕre, to 'reign'.

This richness of forms can be useful for a better understanding, particularly because no subject pronoun is normally specified with the imperative.

Usage

The use of imperative mood can easily be considered offensive or inappropriate in social situations due to universally recognized politeness rules. Therefore, exhortations are often formulated indirectly as questions or assertions, such as:

• Could you come here for a moment?
• I beg you to stop.

and not as commands, such as:

• Come here.
• Stop!

Politeness strategies (for instance, indirect speech acts) can be more appropriate in order not to threaten a conversational partner in his needs of self-determination and territory: the partner's negative face should not be threatened.^[1] As a result, the imperative mood is not necessarily the most-used form to express a request or prohibition.

The imperative mood's appropriateness depends on such factors as psychological and social relationships, as well as the speaker’s basic communicative intention (illocutionary force). For example, the speaker may have the simple intention to offer something, to wish or permit something, or just to apologize, and not to manipulate his conversational partner. In such cases, no restriction will be placed on the use of imperative:

• Come to the party tomorrow!
• Just smoke it if you want it!
• Have a nice trip!
• Excuse me!

First-person plural form

In some languages, including French and Spanish, in addition to the second-person imperative form shown above, there is also a first-person plural (we) imperative form. This form is similar to the second-person imperative form, except that it is conjugated in the first-person plural. It is usually translated into English as let's (short for let us). For example, the French national anthem, La Marseillaise, includes the words Marchons, marchons! (Let's march, let's march!). Irish has imperative forms in all three persons and both numbers, although the first person singular is most commonly found in the negative (e.g. ná cloisim sin arís "let me not hear that again").

Indicative and prohibitive mood

The prohibitive mood (abbreviated proh) is the negative imperative mood. The two moods are often different in word order or in morphology.

English

In English, the imperative mood uses the same word order as the indicative mood, while the prohibitive mood uses a different word order if you is added.

French

Similarly, French uses different word order for the imperative and prohibitive moods:

• Donne-le-leur! (Give it to them!)
• Ne le leur donne pas! (Don't give it to them!)

The prohibitive has the same word order as the indicative. See French personal pronouns#Clitic order for detail.

Hebrew

In Hebrew, the imperative mood has two inflections: one is the original mode and one is in the future. The negative is based on Al אל (like negative-don't)+verb mode in the future.

Japanese

Japanese uses separate verb forms as shown below. For the verb kaku (write):

See also the suffixes 〜なさい (-nasai) and 〜下さい/ください (-kudasai).

Mandarin

Standard Mandarin uses different words of negation for the indicative and the prohibitive moods. For the verb 作 zuò (do):

Footnotes

References

• Austin, J. L. How to do things with words, Oxford, Clarendon Press 1962.
• Schmecken, H. Orbis Romanus, Paderborn, Schöningh 1975, ISBN 3 506 10330.