In today's lesson we will take a look at
imperatives in English.
Imperative statements are used to give an order
command instruction warning and to make a request.
The imperative is one of the three moods of the English verb.
The other two being 'indicative' and 'subjunctive'.
A basic example of an imperative is
To make an imperative it is necessary to use the
infinitive of the verb without using 'to'
for example
To make a negative imperative put
'do not' or 'don't' before the verb.
For example
If you are including yourself in the imperative you can use 'let's'
to show that this is the case.
For example
The negative of let's is let's not.
when it comes to giving orders it is
unusual for adults to tell each other
what to do unless one is in a position
of authority.
Orders are often given to children and to animals.
Teachers often give both instructions and orders,
so it would be fair to say that imperatives
are used a lot by teachers and those
with some form of authority.
Another type of imperative is the warning.
To stress the importance of
something when expressing danger is a warning.
You warn a person of danger.
The intonation of a warning is always stressed
with the last word of the sentence often being higher in tone than the others.
For example -
You will notice in the last example that the tone
at the end of the sentence drops.
This helps to enforce the warning so as to
make the sentence seem less like a request.
Another type of imperative is advice
You offer your thought or comment on
something as a way of offering help.
Advice is normally stressed so is to get
the helpful message across.
Finally we have the request. To request is to ask
someone to do something in a polite way.
A request is not a warning.
Example of request include -
it is worth remembering that an
imperative sentence does not require a
subject as the pronoun 'you' is implied.
So to recap -