Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2020 November 16
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November 16[edit]
Why is the subject of an imperative sentence that mentions someone's name the implied you?[edit]
For instance, I was taught that the subject of "Samuel, drive your sister home from school today." is the "implied you" instead of "Samuel" (even though they represent the same person), but why is that the case? JJP...MASTER!...MASTER!!! master of puppets, i'm pulling your strings (0-3-5)[talk about or to] JJP... master? master? where's the dreams that i've been after (0-3-6-5) 15:02, 16 November 2020 (UTC)
- Because the use of the name is designed to get the attention of the person who the sentence is directed at. No one speaks commas, so ignore any written convention surrounding those. The sentence really is "Drive your sister home from school today", and the "Samuel" at the front is just the speaker saying his name to get his attention. --Jayron32 17:58, 16 November 2020 (UTC)
- You wouldn't necessarily use the person's name. If you were talking to Samuel and said to him "Please drive your sister home from school today", then the command is directed at Samuel, and as "drive" by itself is only a verb-fragment, it needs at least an implied subject to make it grammatically efficacious, and that can only be "you". In other words, "Please (will) you drive your sister home from school today". -- Jack of Oz [pleasantries] 17:59, 16 November 2020 (UTC)
- The vocative "Samuel" is not necessarily "designed to get attention" of Samuel; primarily, it's to clarify who the sentence is addressed to. If Samuel's already paying attention, it could equally well be at the end of the sentence, or in some cases, in the middle. But still, it's true that it could just as well be omitted. I don't think it's very useful to say that there is an "implied subject", but if you believe there must be one, then clearly it is "you". --174.95.161.129 (talk) 03:42, 17 November 2020 (UTC)
- JJPMaster -- In that sentence, the word Samuel plays a role which traditionally is known as the "Vocative", which means that it stands outside the ordinary syntactic relations within a sentence. Some languages (such as Latin) have a vocative case inflection which is often very distinct from the case inflection which indicates a verb subject (the nominative). Also, English bare imperatives are basically 2nd-person only (1st-person plural imperatives are introduced by "Let's", and there's not much in modern English that could usefully be called a 3rd person imperative). AnonMoos (talk) 19:07, 16 November 2020
- Some fixed phrases, like "God bless you", are third-person imperatives. --Trovatore (talk) 19:27, 16 November 2020 (UTC)
- God does not take orders. It's really short for "May God bless you." <-Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots-> 21:14, 16 November 2020 (UTC)
- No. "Bless" here is in the subjunctive mood. The present subjunctive is used for third-person imperatives, among other things. It's not "short for" anything.
- Imperatives are not necessarily "orders" in the aggressive sense of that word. Prayers are also imperatives directed to God, though in the second person.
- I know AnonMoos doesn't believe in the subjunctive. Oh well. --Trovatore (talk) 21:26, 16 November 2020 (UTC)
- I don't believe in a unified subjunctive in modern English -- there are various somewhat isolated remnants and relics and archaisms, and it's very doubtful whether it's useful (when describing modern English only) to try to assemble them all together into a unified verb conjugation or paradigm... AnonMoos (talk) 14:14, 17 November 2020 (UTC)
- Mmm, that is probably true. The thing is that I think the phrase "when describing modern English only" is doing a lot of work there. Why would we want to describe modern English only? A lot of things about modern English become clearer when you compare it to closely related languages, such as other Western European languages. And then these "remnants and relics and archaisms" find fairly neat spots in overarching paradigms. --Trovatore (talk) 18:32, 17 November 2020 (UTC)
- Linguists call it "synchronic description" (the Wikipedia article is apparently the stub Synchrony and diachrony). A historically-oriented description of a language can be interesting, but it can result in a tendency to pursue remote etymological byways, and indulge in comparisons with languages that are quite distant from the language you started with. Confining yourself to the current language only, and what could be reasonably deduced from it by a speaker without any historical knowledge, can be equally valid (depending on which goals you want to achieve). For example, children have no special historical or etymological knowledge when they start to learn their first language... AnonMoos (talk) 18:50, 17 November 2020 (UTC)
- "Wer fremde Sprachen nicht kennt, weiß nichts von seiner eigenen". Yes, if you want to specifically study language acquisition, I can see that there is something to be said for following this synchronic method. It strikes me as really limiting for language description, though, particularly in the context of speakers who can be assumed to have learned something of other languages, and to be able to leverage their tools to make sense of otherwise-disjointed-seeming aspects of their own language. --Trovatore (talk) 19:03, 17 November 2020 (UTC)
- I own a book that you'd hate then: "A Grammar of Spoken English On a Strictly Phonetic Basis" by Harold Palmer (1924). I never saw it, but a grammar of spoken French also came out in the early 20th century, and apparently blew people's minds by ignoring all silent letters, treating definite articles, clitic pronouns, "ne" etc. as prefixes, etc... AnonMoos (talk) 03:28, 20 November 2020 (UTC)
- I'm not sure I'd hate it; it sounds interesting. But the thing is that it seems to me that this synchronic/syntopic/descriptivist approach is almost by design limiting attention to the "surface grammar", whereas with a more diachronic and diatopic approach, you may have a better chance of seeing the deep grammar underlying it. --Trovatore (talk) 05:46, 20 November 2020 (UTC)
- If I had the choice to characterize the vowels in Modern English sing – sang – sung and write – wrote – written either as perfectly regular reflexes of IE ablaut (e-grade – o-grade – zero-grade) or just as irregular debris, I'd opt for the latter. –Austronesier (talk) 10:52, 20 November 2020 (UTC)
- I'm not sure I'd hate it; it sounds interesting. But the thing is that it seems to me that this synchronic/syntopic/descriptivist approach is almost by design limiting attention to the "surface grammar", whereas with a more diachronic and diatopic approach, you may have a better chance of seeing the deep grammar underlying it. --Trovatore (talk) 05:46, 20 November 2020 (UTC)
- I own a book that you'd hate then: "A Grammar of Spoken English On a Strictly Phonetic Basis" by Harold Palmer (1924). I never saw it, but a grammar of spoken French also came out in the early 20th century, and apparently blew people's minds by ignoring all silent letters, treating definite articles, clitic pronouns, "ne" etc. as prefixes, etc... AnonMoos (talk) 03:28, 20 November 2020 (UTC)
- "Wer fremde Sprachen nicht kennt, weiß nichts von seiner eigenen". Yes, if you want to specifically study language acquisition, I can see that there is something to be said for following this synchronic method. It strikes me as really limiting for language description, though, particularly in the context of speakers who can be assumed to have learned something of other languages, and to be able to leverage their tools to make sense of otherwise-disjointed-seeming aspects of their own language. --Trovatore (talk) 19:03, 17 November 2020 (UTC)
- Linguists call it "synchronic description" (the Wikipedia article is apparently the stub Synchrony and diachrony). A historically-oriented description of a language can be interesting, but it can result in a tendency to pursue remote etymological byways, and indulge in comparisons with languages that are quite distant from the language you started with. Confining yourself to the current language only, and what could be reasonably deduced from it by a speaker without any historical knowledge, can be equally valid (depending on which goals you want to achieve). For example, children have no special historical or etymological knowledge when they start to learn their first language... AnonMoos (talk) 18:50, 17 November 2020 (UTC)
- Mmm, that is probably true. The thing is that I think the phrase "when describing modern English only" is doing a lot of work there. Why would we want to describe modern English only? A lot of things about modern English become clearer when you compare it to closely related languages, such as other Western European languages. And then these "remnants and relics and archaisms" find fairly neat spots in overarching paradigms. --Trovatore (talk) 18:32, 17 November 2020 (UTC)
- I don't believe in a unified subjunctive in modern English -- there are various somewhat isolated remnants and relics and archaisms, and it's very doubtful whether it's useful (when describing modern English only) to try to assemble them all together into a unified verb conjugation or paradigm... AnonMoos (talk) 14:14, 17 November 2020 (UTC)
- God does not take orders. It's really short for "May God bless you." <-Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots-> 21:14, 16 November 2020 (UTC)
- Some fixed phrases, like "God bless you", are third-person imperatives. --Trovatore (talk) 19:27, 16 November 2020 (UTC)
- In English, a third-person construction implies the subject and the listener are distinct people. Using a third-person verb for a second-person context comes across as childish or stilted. Instead, we use the name or title as a vocative and keep the second-person pronoun. In the case of an imperative, the pronoun "you" is not stated, and the lack of an explicit subject marks the imperative form. Therefore, analyzing the sentence to have the subject "Samuel" would awkwardly (for English) use a third-person form for a second-person context, and also break the rule that the imperative is marked by lack of an explicit subject. If we instead analyze it as a vocative plus implied "you", that follows both rules and is natural for English. (In some other languages such as Korean, it's a completely different story.) --Amble (talk) 19:10, 16 November 2020 (UTC)
- Another way of saying basically the same: you can replace the sentence "Samuel, drive your sister home from school today" by "Samuel, you have to drive your sister home from school today". If the subject of the command "drive" was third-person, that replacement would have been "Samuel, he has to drive your sister home from school today", something nobody would say if the designated driver ("he") is the same as the person being addressed ("Samuel"). --Lambiam 23:49, 16 November 2020 (UTC)
- Note that any sentence can have a vocative prefixed to it; it doesn't have to be an imperative sentence. But in no case does the vocative become part of the grammar of the sentence. A teacher might say "Samuel, the derivative of x squared is 2x" or "Samuel, Mark Twain was the author of Tom Sawyer". It's obvious in these cases that "Samuel" is not a subject, object or any other grammatical component of the sentence. CodeTalker (talk) 18:12, 17 November 2020 (UTC)