#imperatives

Gretchen: It is a command, but it is not an imperative. Sometimes, you have this – I wanna say – this very imperial Ancient Rome – [imitates imposing voice] the Imperator or the Emperor is saying, “Take this man away,” is sort of a command thing. But you can also use imperatives – the form of the imperative – to do things that are very polite. You can say something like, “Come in,” “Sit down,” “Make yourself at home!” All of these are also imperatives, but they’re polite imperatives.

Lauren: I hope that people don’t think we’re being imperious when we use the imperative to tell them to “Stay lingthusiastic” at the end of an episode.

Gretchen: Secretly, this episode, we’ve been building up to it since the very first one.

Lauren: “Emperor” and “imperative” are related etymologically, I assume.

Gretchen: Yeah. The “emperor” is somebody who has the authority to give commands, and it’s definitely the core function of the imperative is that commanding function. But when I think of imperatives, I think about a young adult novel that came out in 1997 called, Ella Enchanted.

Lauren: Did this also become, I remember, a movie?

Gretchen: No, don’t talk to me about the movie. The movie is bad.

Lauren: Okay. Well, I haven’t seen the film, so that’s fine. We can just talk about the book, which I also have not read. Enlighten us about Ella Enchanted.

Gretchen: Ella Enchanted is one of those fairy tale retellings. In this particular context, the main character has a blessing/curse put on her by a fairy at her birth where she has to be obedient.

Lauren: Is this one of those blessings that inadvertently become a curse?

Gretchen: Yeah. The fairy’s like, “I’m gonna give you this blessing. Ella will always be obedient. Now, stop crying, child!” And the baby has to stop crying because she’s been given this command to stop crying.

Lauren: Very useful.

Gretchen: I mean, like, who amongst us could not find this useful? Unfortunately, she grows up, and if people give her a command even inadvertently, she has to obey it. What’s interesting from a grammatical perspective – and I feel like why I always felt like I had a very solid grasp of what an imperative is – is because she only has to obey things when they’re imperative commands and not when they’re more indirect commands. If somebody says, “Stand up,” “Sit down,” she has to do it. But if someone says, “I wish you would stand up,” or “Why don’t you sit down,” she doesn’t have to do it at that point.

Lauren: Oh my gosh, she’s a walking grammaticality test. She’ll tell you if something’s grammatically an imperative. This is fabulous.

Gretchen: Right?

Lauren: It would be amazing to have someone like this while you’re trying to figure out the grammar of an imperative.

Gretchen: Well, because then you could try it in different languages. Every time I see a stop sign, I’m like, “Ella would just be stuck here. She’d just be stuck here until someone told her to go again.”

Lauren: I assume it’s a pre-technology world because –

Gretchen: It’s like a fairy tale world with horses and stuff. She didn’t have any stop signs.

Lauren: Thank goodness she doesn’t live on the internet because the amount of, like, “Subscribe,” “Click here” – you would be ruined.

Gretchen: Right? Every time she got told to “Like and subscribe,” she’d have to do it. It’s a fairy tale world, so she only has the usual problems with imperatives. But it really – if you ever want a book to just tell you which things are imperatives for 286 pages of a charming young adult fantasy novel, I would recommend it.

Lauren: I feel like if you have very small children in your life, you’re also quite sensitive to imperatives and using them. There’s a lot of having to be very direct at children. Even if you have a habit of maybe doing things more politely and indirectly while talking to adults, you just have to tell children to do and to not do things quite a lot. If you have small children or maybe cheeky pets in your life –

Gretchen: [Laughs] Pets. “No, get off that! Don’t run into traffic!”

Lauren: “Sit.” Perfectly efficient.

Gretchen: “Sit!” “Stay!” “Eat your breakfast!”

Lauren: Yeah, I was gonna say I can’t tell if you’re giving that example to a child or to a pet but, honestly, pretty much the same.

Gretchen: Does it matter?

Lauren: If you have small people in your life, you’re probably quite sensitive to imperatives.

Gretchen: Meanwhile, I’m just sitting here with my tomato plants being like, “Grow! Grow!” That’s one of the things that’s really interesting about a part in Ella Enchanted. At one point she gets a letter from her father, and then she’s like, “Wait, I gonna make this other person read it and summarize it to me” because if there are commands in it then she could summarize what they are in ways that aren’t actually commands. In another context, she’s interacting with a character who she doesn’t really like but because that character is only saying, “I wish you would do this,” or “Why can’t you stop doing that,” she doesn’t actually have to obey that person because that character is still trying to be polite. Imperatives have this interesting interaction with politeness and with how we relate to each other as people – who is it okay to give a direct imperative to, and what level of politeness does that have?

Lauren: It seems like giving direct imperatives to kids is something that occurs across a lot of different cultures. We don’t have the data to say with confidence that it happens across all languages. In some languages, it’s weirder to give direct imperatives to people who you’re not familiar with. Maybe if you’re more familiar with someone – you might give more direct imperatives to someone you live with and spend a lot of time with. It really can vary across cultures and across individual contexts. One particular example I like is Sara Ciesielski’s work on the acquisition of Sherpa by children. Sherpa is a Tibeto-Burman language. It’s in the same family of languages I work with. In Sara’s work – there’s a great three-minute thesis video summarizing it – what she found was that parents give a particular type of direct imperative to small children. As the children grow older, they give those imperatives less. Children stop doing particularly foolhardy things, and they start to become more socialized into behaving in a socially appropriate way. In her data she found that, as those children got older, they were given fewer imperatives, but if they were talking to younger children, they would give them in the way that the adults do. You could see them getting socialized into this process of, “If I’m talking to someone younger than me, and someone who’s very young, I have to give them lots of direct imperative commands.”

Gretchen: I feel like I remember something about children learning a lot of imperatives very early in Mayan languages as well. I’m not sure. Now, I’m trying to find the paper. Of course, I can’t find it again. But I remember reading a paper in grad school about Mayan children learning a lot of imperatives. I think it was Ki’che’, maybe, or some combination of Ki’che’, Yucatec, and possibly Mam. These are languages that do a fair number of things with the verbs, but the imperatives tend to be morphologically very short and very simple and not have a lot of prefixes and suffixes. They also make really good words for children to start learning more complicated verbal structures with.

Lauren: Right. So, they learn these structures, but they also learn who it’s socially appropriate to use them with. I mean, it’s one of those things – I have no real depth of knowledge about child language acquisition – but I’m always amazed by like, children are given so many imperatives, but they still manage to use verbs and acquire verbs in all their other forms even though, for some cases – and I know in Sara’s work – the number of verbs in the imperative form that children are exposed to is multiple times more than some other grammatical structures. But they manage to all grow up using more than just imperative forms of verbs.

Gretchen: Well, and kids also overhear speech of adults between each other even if they’re not addressed like that themselves.

Lauren: Absolutely.

Gretchen: You have a variety of things that you’re exposed to. But yeah, the imperative is this interesting – it’s like how linguists often observe that words that are for close family members have certain sounds that tend to be cross-linguistically easier. You know, “Mama,” “Baba,” “Dada,” “Nana,” “Tata,” “Papa.” There’s a small set of syllables that are pretty easy for kids. Often, the names for close family members are from some subset of those syllables. They’re not necessarily exactly the same from language to language, but they’re a bit more similar than you’d expect coincidentally. I think that imperatives often being a little bit easier, a little bit shorter, having a little bit less-complex verbal morphology on them – I don’t know if someone has done that official typological study, but it seems like there’s a general trend in that direction.

Lauren: Which you’d need when someone is dangerously going in the wrong direction and you need to tell them to stop, or someone is just being a little bit too hectic and you need to tell them to sit.

Gretchen: You can imagine early humans – like a kid putting their hand into fire or something – and you have to be like, “No, stop!” Kids can try to do very dangerous things in lots of contexts. It’s useful to have language that’s accessible to tell them how to not do that.

Lauren: Those short forms, we often talk about them as being bare because they don’t have any extra morphemes that we stick on. Some languages do have a specific grammatical suffix that they’ll stick on for an imperative. In Yolmo and other Tibetan languages, the politer form of the imperative has the suffix “-tong” or “-dong.” There are some that just are bare if you’re being very direct at someone.

Gretchen: English for the most part has a bare imperative as well. You have, “Sit,” “Stand,” and it’s not like “sitting,” or “stance,” or “walked,” which would be adding some sort of morpheme on there. I guess, in principle, you could add a prefix on there. I’m not aware of a language that does, but there probably is one somewhere.

Lauren: It’s always dangerous to say languages don’t do something because they’ll be some awesome language somewhere that does the thing.

Gretchen: There’s probably some somewhere that do a prefix. I wouldn’t put money on that not happening. Often imperatives are a bit on the short side, especially ones that are informal or singular – like the kinds you would use with a child – compared to polite imperatives. Oh, you could put lots of morphology on to be polite.

Lauren: There’s the suffix in Yolmo, and then there’s a whole different form if you’re being very polite in the honorific register. We’ve talked about honorifics in a bonus episode before, and I’ve talked about that vocabulary there. Again, that’s that thing about giving a command is not necessarily impolite, you just have to use the correct honorific verb form to be polite when you’re asking a visiting guru to come with you or to please sit down. There’s a way to do that politely.

Gretchen: I first, I think, encountered “imperative,” at least as a term, when I was studying Latin. They have a singular and a plural imperative, so if you’re giving a command to one person or if you’ve giving a command to multiple people, which many languages do something like this. The singular imperative is just the bare root of the verb with the theme vowel. You have something like, “Veni,” which means, “Come,” singular, and then “Venite,” is “Come,” plural, “All of you come.”

Lauren: Good for specific command giving.

Gretchen: Yeah. There’s this extra morpheme on the plural form, but the singular one, which is your “Am I giving this command to a child,” is the very simple form.

Lauren: I did say Yolmo had that suffix, but there are a couple of verbs where, instead of using a suffix for the regular, everyday imperative, there’s just a completely different word. The most common one is – Yolmo has the word, “sa,” for “eat.” If it was just a regular imperative based on the model of almost every other verb, it would be, “Sadong.” But for this verb specifically, you have a completely different form of the word. You just say, “So.”

Gretchen: And there’s no “-dong” at all?

Lauren: There’s no “-dong” at all there. There’s no suffix there. It’s just a very short form. It’s a word I heard a lot – people asking me to eat as a guest. It’s one I’m very familiar with.

Gretchen: This actually happens in a variety of contexts where you’d expect one specific thing with the prefixes and suffixes, and then you get a different form of the root entirely. In French, for example, most of the imperatives do a very similar thing. You have, “parler,” is “to talk,” and “parler” is also the imperative and the plural imperative. But then for a few words – and one of them is “be” – you have “je suis/tu es,” so “you are” – “es.” But the imperative, like “Be quiet,” which you would say to a child perhaps, is “sois” – “Sois tranquille.” Literally, “Be tranquil,” I guess, but it’s used for “Be quiet.” Or “soyez” if it’s plural. Like, “Children, soyez tranquille,” like, “All of you be quiet.” English actually also kind of does this.

Lauren: Right.

Gretchen: This is the one maybe true imperative that you can test like, “Is this verb being imperative right now?”

Lauren: You told me this the other day, and I was wracking my brain for ages trying to think about something where it changes completely in English.

Gretchen: Have you figured it out yet?

Lauren: I’ve not figured it out, but now you’ve given me that example, I be it’s something to do with the “is/be” copula. That verb is a mess in English.

Gretchen: Yeah, it is “be.” “Be” is just one of those really neat verbs because it’s historically three different verbs all with their different forms glommed onto each other. Like, the “is/are” one, and you have the “wesan” with “was” and “were,” and then they also have “be” and “being” and “been.” Those are all from three different roots that get glommed together to make one mega verb.

Lauren: Yay, language!

Gretchen: Yay, language! This is a process that actually happens fairly often in languages just for a small handful of very, very common words. So, “be,” or “have,” or maybe something like “eat” – very, very common words. Sometimes they get really irregular or they get made out of combinations of several different verbs. Because they’re so common, people can just remember this, whereas if it’s really rare verb that maybe you don’t encounter until you’re a bit older or you don’t encounter very often, it’d be hard to remember like, “Oh, this verb has completely different letters in it.”

Lauren: It would be very weird for English to have a completely different form of the word “to crochet” for an imperative because most people don’t talk about crocheting a lot, and if you do, you rarely tell people that they have to as a command. When you have this pattern that fits for every verb except maybe one or two for the imperative or for other things as well. English is great with this kind of thing in tense when you have, “I go/I went.” “Went” is absolutely a completely different word to “go,” but we use it in the past. This happens often enough in English that when we have these forms that don’t fit the pattern, we call it a “suppletive” form.

Gretchen: Sometimes the imperative is where a suppletive shows up. Sometimes it’s also a past or something else you could do with things. Sometimes you can have a suppletive imperative, which kind of defies the point about maybe them being easy for children to learn, but they are super common.

Lauren: You tend to hear suppletive forms with lots of frequency. That’s how they manage to stick around.

Gretchen: Sometimes you also get a negative imperative.

Lauren: Yes. As with the fact that some languages use particular morphemes and some languages don’t use any morphemes, which is a nice throwback to our zero morphemes in the “Nothing Means Something” episode, if you remember that sometimes the absence of something is still functional, there’s a whole range of different ways that negating can interact with imperatives. But the thing that I find most charming about the relationship between negating and imperatives is that a negative imperative, as a category, can sometimes be called a “prohibitive,” which is just one of those, “I get that. That does exactly what that label says.”

Gretchen: Yes, the “imperative” is you command someone to do something. The “prohibitive” is you prohibit them from doing something, which makes sense. I have definitely just encountered the terminology “negative imperative.” I hadn’t encountered “prohibitive.” I think maybe a little bit of the literature, or until you mentioned it, I was like, “Oh, I guess you could call it that. I dunno if I would though.”

Lauren: I think it’s the kind of thing where if your language does something interesting around negative imperatives, you’re more likely to come up with the name “prohibitive,” whereas, for example, in Yolmo, you don’t use that imperative suffix with the negative. You just use the negative and the verb. Because it acts a bit differently to the imperative, I’m more likely to think of it as a prohibitive because it’s a slightly different structure. I think this comes back to a larger conversation about whether you lump certain phenomena together because they’re all similar enough in the languages that you encounter or if you split them up because they behave very differently.

Gretchen: I think I’m maybe more of a lumper than a splitter, but it depends a lot on the context because what sort of thing you’re exposed to can lead you more into lumper-ish or splitter-ish directions for particular things. Some languages just throw in a negator. Some languages, the negative bit for imperatives is a different negative morpheme than the negative morpheme in other contexts. Some languages you use a different form of the verb. When I was learning a lot of romance languages, the thing that always used to really just kind of grind my gears and show my lumper-ish tendencies was they’d be like, “Okay, here are all the different ways of doing the imperative,” and there’d be two that would correspond to the Latin one of the singular and the plural one, and then there’d be the polite one, and there’d be the ”we” form for like, “Let’s this,” and there’d be the negative ones. Those would all be borrowed from the subjunctive.

Lauren: Which is an entirely different category with an entirely different set of functions but kind of borrowable.

Gretchen: We’re not gonna get into the subjunctive right now because the subjunctive is a whole other episode someday. But I’d be like, “These forms are not some weird, surprising thing that you actually have to memorize 17 different things.” What it is is, “Look over here in this table on Page 56 and just borrow the ones from the table on Page 56.” You only have to memorize one bit of information, which is the “Go to Page 56 for this form.” You don’t have to just suddenly memorize this whole other table as if it’s some sort of surprising thing that’s unconnected. It’s really just borrowing from a different part of the paradigm.

Lauren: Yeah, sometimes imperatives do share features or functions with other categories, which is a thing that crops up a lot in different categories of grammar. It’s part of the fun of human languages and how they evolve in different directions and borrow things from themselves and copy across from different parts.

Gretchen: It’s interesting to think, “Okay, what was the historical version of this?” What was the version of this language early on when they were like, “Oh, we don’t quite have an imperative for this particular context – where else can we get something from the set of verbs that we do have or something from the set of things we’re used to doing with verbs?”

Lauren: Another thing that makes imperatives particularly interesting to try and elicit from someone if you’re doing elicitation to figure out the grammar of a language as a linguist or if you just want to learn a language through politely interrogating native speakers is that it’s actually really difficult to ask someone to tell you how – that they should tell you to do something. It’s a socially complicated little situation.

Gretchen: Because if you say something like, “Tell me that I should sit down,” they’d be like, “Okay, you should sit down.” And you’re like, “No, wait! That’s not imperative. That’s a different statement.”

Lauren: Asking someone to tell you to do something directly, when they clearly don’t actually want you to eat, so it feels weird and unnatural to be like, “Eat!”

Gretchen: And some people find it more fun to join that play space about language like, “Let’s imagine that we have a dog, and we’re trying to get the dog to eat” or “Let’s imagine we’re trying to tell a child to eat,” or something like that. It’s trying to figure out, okay, what is the exact context that can create the scenario which it would be said even though it’s said a lot.

Lauren: That’s not even taking into account that you might be working with someone in a culture where it is just so rude to give someone a direct command and that you need to observe them hanging out with a child or a pet or a person they’re really close to to get actual uses of the imperative because you’re some outsider to whom it would be incredibly rude to do that.

Gretchen: Some places you can use imperatives politely as well. But there’s often this additional social context. I think that there’s also – we were talking about earlier about like, well, you have this polite imperative or you have this plural imperative or this honorific imperative, and in a lot of the European languages that have these polite second-person pronouns, “vous” or “sei” or “Usted” or something like that, they also figured out some sort of imperative there which is borrowed from some other bit of the verbal thing there because like, “Oh, we need an imperative, but this was actually originally a third-person” or a plural or something, and you have to grab it from somewhere else. Imperatives start you in into, “Okay, what do people do in this language and in this particular culture when they’re addressing somebody? What are the ways you address somebody? What are the ways you don’t address somebody? Which things are polite? Which things are impolite? What are all the things you can do?” There’s this word in French that I don’t actually know what it means so much as I know how it’s used, which is just the word you add to something to make it a polite imperative.

Lauren: Excellent.

Gretchen: It’s “veuillez.” It’s got a lot of Ls in it. That’s what French does. You’ll see it on a lot of official signage. I don’t know if I’ve ever heard someone say it out loud, but it’s on so much signage. You’d have like, “Veuillez sit down when the train is in motion,” or something like this.

Lauren: It’s where you’d use “please” in a polite English imperative.

Gretchen: But it’s not “please” because you can put “s'il vous plait” in there as well, which is “please.” It’s just the polite verb that you use for the polite things. I’m sure it has a literal meaning, but that literal meaning is not as relevant as the fact that it’s the polite verb you use for the polite things.

Lauren: The social function of giving a command is also why imperatives are discussed as a thing where you direct it toward someone else who’s also there – a second person, “You do this” – because in order for a command to be effective, it has to be a person delivering it to another person.

Gretchen: It sort of depends on how lumper and splitter-y you wanna get. If you wanna talk about first-person plural imperatives, if you wanna talk about something like, “let’s,” as an imperative or using other words like a hortative, it depends on what the grammar of a particular language is doing whether it makes sense to group it with the imperatives or not. Sometimes, like, “Let’s go,” or like, “Let him go,” “Let them eat cake” – sometimes those are treated with the imperatives and sometimes they’re not. But there’s also a core set of imperatives of like, okay, well, what do you do if you’re addressing one person, maybe a few people? And then there’s all of the ancillary stuff around imperatives which is still just not that big of a space. I think it’s one of those things where there’s something about how humans organize their societies and their culture and their notions of self-hood and –

Lauren: And how human brains are constructed.

Gretchen: How human brains are constructed. It’s kind of like how human societies have words for day and night cycles because we live on a planet that has a certain day and night cycle that’s really salient to everybody who’s here. That doesn’t mean, in theory, you couldn’t have humans who lived on a different planet that had drastically different day and night cycles that could have words for those sorts of things.

Lauren: This is why I love speculative science fiction because you get to build worlds where if you had people who could melt their consciousnesses together, then the distinction between giving a command as an imperative to a second person becomes less meaningful if you’re all the one consciousness.

Gretchen: Yeah, if you had neuro links or a society with magic or something where certain imperatives come with the force of commands where they’re magically enforced and certain ones are suggestions, maybe that ends up showing up in the grammar at some point. Or if you had, I don’t know, swarm consciousnesses or something, or diffused consciousnesses, maybe the first and second persons would work really differently because your notion of consciousness would be different.

Lauren: If you had multiple consciousnesses within one body, would you use a third-person imperative to talk to yourself?

Gretchen: I think there are people who have distributed consciousness or multiple consciousnesses, and they do various things – sometimes a “we,” sometimes, addressing other people.

Lauren: There’s so much scope for possibility, and humans occupy a tiny piece of that real estate, usually.

Gretchen: In Embassytown by China Mieville, there’s this thing where you have two brains that are occupying – they have to say all of the words together at the same time.

Lauren: Ah, yeah. It’s been a long time since I’ve read that book, and it is so full of fantasticness that I can’t even remember how those multiple-brain persons exist.

Gretchen: It’s been a long time since I read this book as well. I did not re-read it like Ella Enchanted, but I remember that in text, the words that they say simultaneously are written above and below a long line – like an em dash or a long em dash – and the words are written above and below. You have two mouths but one consciousness. It’s a surface-level treatment there because it’s not asking the question of, “What would that mean for first persons and second persons and third persons?” It’s just like, they say all of the words all at once even if it’s just a noun.

Lauren: Gonna write a grant application to do fieldwork with fictional aliens in a sci-fi fictional world.

Gretchen: I just think the space is really underdeveloped and some people should be working on it.

Lauren: There’s so much possibility for what an imperative could do in other consciousnesses, but in the human languages that we know about and have been discussed, in general, it’s doing something with the verb. That’s where it tends to hang out. That’s what we’ve been discussing so far. As always, I’m sure there are many caveats and complications, but it’s doing something to the verb that’s different from, say, something like tense, which is looking at time and where in time the verb is situated. It’s turning something that’s an action into a command.

Gretchen: There’s a distinction – I think the easiest one to notice is the distinction between something like, “I see,” “I look,” “I sit,” “I go,” versus, “See,” “Look,” “Sit,” “Go,” where one of them is describing something that’s going on, and the other one is giving a command which could have all the functions of polite command or impolite command in that range. It does change the vibe of the verb. The Romans, who did a lot of the descriptive grammatical tradition that we’ve inherited in the European language space, called this the “mood” of the verb. I think we should maybe rename it the “vibe” of the verb because it seems very intuitive to me. “Mood” in this context is not like, “Is the verb happy or sad,” it’s just a vowel shift from “mode.” Like, what “mode” is this verb in? It’s in the command mode. It’s in the declarative mode, the describing things mode. It’s kind of like, you know, set your gears to start or to reverse or to –

Lauren: And look, I’m not gonna lie. I think when these labels got added – around 500 years ago they became really consistent with grammar teaching – when they chose this word, I’m pretty sure they chose it for a really similar reason that you chose “vibe.” “Mode” is just this general word. It’s still a pretty general word. We use it for fashion or, as you said, a mode of a machine.

Gretchen: You’re mode of transportation.

Lauren: It’s just one of these wonderfully convenient labels that you don’t have to interrogate too deeply.

Gretchen: “Mode” seems to imply that you can have a given verb, and it can sometimes be in this mode and sometimes be in that mode, whereas “class” implies you have, you know, some verbs are in this class and some verbs are in that class, and they don’t correspond. But they’re all generic categorization words. They kind of just picked one. As far as I can tell, they just picked one and then that became the name for this distinction that they were trying to talk about of “Is the verb like this or is the verb like that?” Well, that’s it’s “mode.” Then we had an unfortunate vowel shift, and it seems like it corresponds to a mood like happy or sad. “Mode” is sort of the more intuitive way of thinking about what the difference is between these categories.

Lauren: People will sometimes use “mood,” and they’ll sometimes use “mode” and talk about “modality” If you see something that’s talking about “modality” in linguistics, it’s generally talking about, well, is it just a declarative sentence explaining how the world works or is it in one of these other modes like the imperative. There are a whole bunch of others in this category.

Gretchen: Well, and sometimes “modality” is also used for modals, like “can” and “must” and “should” and stuff like that.

Lauren: Oh, we should talk about modal verbs.

Gretchen: Yeah! We should do a whole episode about modals.

Lauren: With evidentiality, which is something we’ve done a whole episode on, there is a lot of discussion about –

Gretchen: Which is your favourite thing.

Lauren: Which is one of my favourite things. There’s a whole discussion about whether evidentiality is its own category separate from mode, or if it sits within a more lumper definition of “mode,” or whether we split it off as its own, or if it sits in a subcategory. It reminds me a lot about how I imagine the early discussions around biological classification must’ve happened.

Gretchen: Because at a certain point you’re like, okay, so we need to have all of these different sorts of levels of “Are these just different species of birds or are they all birds together? Here we’ve got the mammals. Here we’ve got” – I’m not a biologist; I’m not gonna torture this metaphor too far – but which of the things are more closely related? Which are the things that are more distantly related? There’s several levels here, but some of them you’re like, “Well, they just needed to come up with another name for this.” It’s useful to have a name as a handle so that we’re all talking about the same thing, but sometimes those names don’t always have a very good etymological reason for why they’re called that thing in particular. Sometimes it’s just like, “Well, we needed a name for this group.”

Lauren: And sometimes a level – because there are classes in biological animal kingdom hierarchies, right. So, the word “class” there has a really specific meaning, whereas we could just talk about a general class of objects or a particular class of students. It has all these different meanings. I think “mode” is one of those similar words that has lots of different meanings but in linguistics tends to have this specific meaning.

Gretchen: Yeah. And this is a thing that academic disciplines, especially, in the natural philosophy vibe of categorising the world and trying to figure out which things are more related to each other tends to go into common words and say, “Ah, we’re gonna come up with a technical definition for this one,” and be like, “Well, technically, this is what a reptile is now,” or like, “Technically, this is what a mood is now. This is what a mode is.” You end up with this situation where the technical definitions and the vernacular definitions co-exist. That can sometimes lead to almost more confusion where you’re like, “I need to figure out, first of all, is this person using the technical meaning right now or are they using the vernacular meaning. Which one am I trying to use? Which one is appropriate for this context?” In addition to “What is this word?” Whereas, sometimes, if there’s an entirely new word for something, it’s just like, “Oh, well, I’ve learned this new word and it refers to this specific thing and it always refers to that.” There isn’t this competing vernacular definition that also exists. The way that this often gets taught in classrooms is like, “Well, the vernacular version you learned is wrong. This is the real definition.” But I think we’re interested in describing language and saying, descriptively, people use “mode” in all sorts of different ways – people use “mood” in all sorts of different ways. It’s just that in certain contexts there’s this one very particular definition that it’s used with in this one case. Oh, “case,” that’s another one. Look, you can use “case” to mean a whole lot of things! There’s one technical linguistic meaning of it, but there’s also a lot of other ways you could use “case.” Sometimes the metaphor goes in the other direction. Sometimes a word gets borrowed from grammatical terminology into the more generic life circumstances as well. “Gender” initially referred to just a class, like a genre, and then it gets used in a vernacular sense as well.

Lauren: I have a sense that imperative – if something is very important, it’s “imperative” – came from the urgency of a command as well.

Gretchen: That’s possible. The idea of like, okay, well, this is this particular grammatical thing but also can get used metaphorically for the whole related set of ideas.

Lauren: In much the same way that the Linnaean biological classification system owes a lot to Latin terminology and that Western tradition of classification, I can’t help but feel that part of the reason we have a category of imperatives is because, as you mentioned earlier, Latin happens to have a very clear imperative form of the verb. I wonder what would’ve happened to a grammatical tradition and how we classify modality and mode and imperatives if we started with a language that didn’t have those structures.

Gretchen: I think it’s a difficult to answer question, but it’s a really valid question. I found Latin has a reputation of like, “Oh, I didn’t understand grammar until I studied Latin.” That’s not because other languages don’t have grammar. It’s because a lot of our grammatical terminology was invented specifically for Latin and to work really well with Latin. Then you end up learning about how English grammar works because you learn Latin in a very translate-y sort of way, and you learn what the reflexes are of particular English-y things in Latin or of things in another language in Latin. It feels like Latin grammar is easier because the grammar as we learn it was invented to fit Latin really well.

Lauren: As someone who didn’t study Latin, I’m very happy to say that I didn’t understand English grammar until I studied linguistics. It achieves similar ends but from a very different perspective.

Gretchen: I think, having studied both Latin and linguistics, there’s a sense in which the grammar of Latin is very catalogued in many cases, it’s very pinned down, because it’s not a language that’s actively being spoken by people. It has been finitely described. The thing that excites me about linguistics is you can approach grammar in this more experimental way where you can say things like, “Is the imperative really valid in this language?” Or “Does this language have a prohibitive?” “Is this useful categorization to make?” “Is this a useful distinction to make?” That’s something that’s less the case when you’re talking about one very well-described language and something that’s more the case when you’re trying to figure out, okay, how do languages compare with each other or what’s going on in language in general or what else is going on here or what’s going on in the language that isn’t as well described. It’s a more expansive look at how grammar can work than just like, okay, here’s a list of all the stuff you learned. You can be trying to figure out what’s going on with grammar.

Lauren: One of the joys of the imperative, as we said, it’s really relatively uncomplex grammatically across a lot of different languages and that it’s so interactively complicated and fascinating. I think that’s what keeps bringing me back to this category.

Gretchen: Which makes it a good introduction to the idea of, okay, how could we do these categories? What does it mean for a verb to have a “mood” or a “mode”? Whereas something like with the subjunctive, which is another mood, is harder to wrap your head around. If you’re trying to get a handle on both of things at the same time, it can be overwhelming. Whereas the imperative is a good slice to break off of “Here’s this thing that we know how to do the command thing. Someone wrote a YA novel about it in 1997.” But also, it’s this gateway into considering this broader question of like, yeah, what sort of vibes can the verbs have.

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Gretchen: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, YouTube, or wherever else you get your podcasts. You can follow @Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get IPA scarves, IPA greeting cards, and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com, and my book about internet language is called Because Internet.

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Gretchen: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our Senior Producer is Claire Gawne, our Editorial Producer is Sarah Dopierala, and our music is “Ancient City” by the Triangles.

Lauren: Stay lingthusiastic!

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