The function of non-canonical imperatives in the languages of Europe

Higher hearer’s power/status ⇒
Lesser hearer’s obligation to comply
Greater speaker’s need to be deferent
Grammatically, verbal manipulation tends to merge with grammatical elements regarding
honorification, deference and, Givón argues, even epistemic certainty, which ties in with
Searle’s indirect speech act duality mentioned earlier (i.e. a command made through a
question is both a command and a question). That is to say, the speaker reserves himself if he
doesn’t know how capable the hearer is of performing said action, so a question like “do you
think you could fix the pipes” also doubles as a command, and an answer to the question
(“yes, I think I can”) or a response to the command (“alright, I’ll give it a try”) is equally
valid.
Weakening or softening a command is typically done with a number of devices. A
command is generally considered less direct when produced in declarative, interrogative and,
as we’ll see later on, optative sentences than when given in the imperative. According to
Givón, sentence length, questions, overt mention of the manipulee in any form, negation, and
usage of irrealis, modal or cognitive verbs all contribute to a less direct command. So, from
the extremely direct “Shut up!” these devices may be used to transition all the way over to the
polar opposite, the extremely indirect “wouldn’t it be awfully nice if you could perhaps be
quiet” Note that indirectness affects the manipulative force of a command; a direct order is
much more forceful and effective than is an indirect one. However, it is not hard to imagine
that asking your superior to do something for you is more effective if you by circumlocution
bring out the deference in long, negative modal questions than if you essential were to tell him
to do it. In other words, the rules governing the use of imperative and their correspondence to
direct or indirect commands, regardless of complexity in different languages are universally
and uniformly complex.
1.3 Optativity in imperatives
Historically plentiful but rather uncommon in modern-day European languages, the optative
mood is used to express wishes as well as the giving and requesting of consent for an action.
As many of the non-canonical forms of the imperative have optative-like functions, a bit of
background on optativity may be warranted.
In many languages, certainly in Europe, the optative mood supplements the imperative.
In Finnish and Estonian, the third person and passive imperatives takes their forms from the
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