to be or not to be...

[Leonor Scliar Cabral]

The stem of the imperative being the same of the infinitive does not mean
that "it has the same functions", since infinitives can only be either a
nominal form or belong to a compound verb (without tense and person
markers).
Imperatives, even if they do not show an overt morpheme of person and
tense, carry their meanings:
The person referent is recovered when the sentence is uttered by
defaut/pragmatic processes: it always refers to the addressee, since we
cannot give an order to ourselves and it is useless to give it to somebody
about whom we are talking.
Past tense is excluded for the same pragmatic reasons.
The tense is an unmarked present/future.
Prof. Dr.
Leonor Scliar-Cabral

Susanne Dopke wrote:

> I didn't like the "infinitive" explanation for imperatives which came
> around last week. If we look to other languages we mostly find that the
> singular imperative is the stem of the verb, the plural often coincides
> with 2nd plural, eg. in German and French. It just so happens that
> English uses the stem form for the infinitive and most of its present
> tense forms.
> Susanne
>
> Susanne Dopke (PhD)
> P.O Box 11A (Linguistics)
> Monash University VIC 3800
> Australia
> phone: +61-3-99052298 or 9439 4148
> fax: +61-3-99052294