Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2025 September 16

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September 16

Very abstract imperative

What's the grammar of commands such as:

Prevent fires

Drink Guinness

Report thefts

They don't specify which fires/Guinness/thefts, and the time is at any time, ongoing. What name can I call these kind of commands, to distinguish them from commands like fix [your] bayonets or [put your] hands up?

 Card Zero  (talk) 13:53, 16 September 2025 (UTC)

Life hacks? -- Verbarson  ^talk_edits 20:36, 16 September 2025 (UTC)

The lack of specificity is not connected to these sentences having an imerative verb form:

• Fires can be deadly.
• Guinness is good for you.
• Thefts must be reported without delay.

 ​‑‑Lambiam 23:01, 16 September 2025 (UTC)

What's on my mind is that some imperative commands look the same as these. If Captain Kirk says "set phasers to stun" he implicitly means your own phasers right now, and not just phasers in general, and not just more often. It's not general life advice. But can I do better than the bolded phrase? Isn't there a "general advisory mood" or some other technical term? Well, maybe that's for the best. "Minimize the use of jargon," as the MOS says.  Card Zero  (talk) 23:40, 16 September 2025 (UTC)

You're familiar with grammatical mood, but this is actually a different axis of the tense–aspect–mood system. Specifically, grammatical aspect, how a verbal action, event, or state, extends over time.

Your examples fall under imperfective aspect, used for situations conceived as existing continuously or habitually as time flows ("I was helping him"; "I used to help people"). The relevant subtype is habitual aspect which refers to long spans of time. There is also gnomic aspect which refers to generalities.

Habitual aspect:

provides structural information on the nature of the subject referent, "John smokes" being interpretable as "John is a smoker", "Enjoh habitually gets up early in the morning" as "Enjoh is an early bird". The habitual aspect is a type of imperfective aspect, which does not depict an event as a single entity viewed only as a whole but instead specifies something about its internal temporal structure.

Gnomic aspect:

is a grammatical feature (which may refer to aspect, mood, or tense) that expresses general truths or aphorisms. [...] Used to describe a tense, the gnomic is considered neutral by not limiting action, in particular, to the past, present, or future. Examples of the gnomic include such generic statements as: "birds fly"; "sugar is sweet"; and "a mother can always tell".

Blepbob (talk) 03:02, 17 September 2025 (UTC)

Prevent fires and Report thefts have the same structure: a finite verb in the imperative mood followed by a direct object. What sets it apart from Fix your bayonets or Put your hands up is the definiteness of that object. They are indefinite. That's the only grammatical difference.

Guinness is a substance (unless you're talking about a container filled with Guinness) and substances have their own rules concerning definiteness. Drink Guinness may still be said for a particular occasion to drink it. PiusImpavidus (talk) 08:15, 17 September 2025 (UTC)

So @Card Zero, it seems you have the option to call your commands either "indefinite habitual gnomic imperatives" or "general life advice". Dealer's choice! Blepbob (talk) 22:47, 17 September 2025 (UTC)

Let me try this out:

A command like join hands, chop wood, skip rope, hands up, or weigh anchor, despite lacking the definite article or a determiner, is semantically definite. From context it has the perfective aspect (referring to a single completable action), despite resembling the habitual aspect.

Can I really combine habitual with gnomic? That would lead to ... hobbits surely.

I'm unclear about chop wood and skip rope. In any likely context they refer to the (or some) wood or rope, but maybe these two are indefinite anyway. Or vaguely definite. I've been working with a Romanian guy, he seems unwilling to risk the use of English articles or determiners, so I have to interpret a lot of confusing minimalistic commands like these.  Card Zero  (talk) 02:05, 18 September 2025 (UTC)

Still, the issue whether a noun phrase is semantically definite or not is IMO orthogonal to whether it is used in an imperative sentence or in some other way, such as in a declarative sentence (“They want to join hands with us.” ... “I’ll wager these dainty pinkies never weighed anchor in a storm.”).  ​‑‑Lambiam 20:17, 19 September 2025 (UTC)