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

Furthermore, to shed light on the intricate workings of social interaction and how it
impacts on our use of language, and indeed dictates its protocol, the concept of face needs to
be explained.
Erving Goffman (1967, 1971, 1981), a sociologist, established the concept of face,
which may roughly be defined as the public image that an individual wishes to project, that is
to say how he or she wishes other people to view him/her. This concept was elaborated on by
Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987) where it was further split in two subsections, positive and
negative face respectively, where positive face represents the individual’s wish to be viewed
as worthy of approval by others and/or to be part of a community, and negative face in turn
representing how the individual wants to be recognized as autonomous and independent.
Depending on the face that a person wishes to project, certain actions or utterances
directed towards said person can have an adverse impact on his face, something which Brown
and Levinson has named face-threatening acts. Threats to a positive face arise when the
person in question is overtly disagreed with, interrupted or accused for something unfavorable
to his image, possibly lowering his social or self-esteem. Threats to negative face include
commanding, requesting from or advising the person, and thus conflicting with his sense of
autonomy.
The acts that threaten the negative face are the ones that commonly relate to
imperatives, and it is here circumlocution, paraphrase or a different person of imperative is
warranted. This will be further discussed in the sections regarding third person imperatives,
since it is these forms that most closely relates to this phenomenon.
1.2 Manipulation and authority
An important feature of imperatives, I daresay one of the most central, is that of command,
direction and elicitation of action. As mentioned earlier, every one of the world’s languages
have some way or another to express desire that something is to be done, and this is typically
done with imperatives. Givón (2001) defines the imperative in the following locution:
Under the generic umbrella of imperative fall a potentially large number of manipulative
speech-acts. The common denominator of all of them has to do with intended manipulation.
They are all verbal acts by which the speaker attempts to get the hearer to act.
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