What are imperatives? English Imperative Use - Learn English Imperative Use - English Grammar Lesson

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 -