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- Title
The syntax of imperative constructions in early modern English and present-day English: A principles and parameters approach.
- Authors
Morapedi, Setumile
- Abstract
This paper has examined and compared the imperative constructions in Early Modern English (EME) and Present Day English. The structural differences that are found in the word order of imperatives in EME and PDE brought some theoretical interest on the part of the author of this paper in the sense that these differences are assumed to be associated with properties of functional heads in Principles and Parameter (P&P) Theory developed by Chomsky (1993). In the P&P theory, EME imperatives are assumed to have tense position of the verb phrase determined by the strength of the properties of such heads. Lack of movement of verb to tense position in PDE is attributable to weak properties of the same type of heads. Previous studies that worked on EME have not given attention to the comparison of EME and Present Day English. The tendency for them has always been to focus on word order on EME and the earlier versions of English. The purpose of the present study is to compare the syntax of imperatives in EME and PDE, focusing on the movement from the verb phrase to the inflectional and then into the complement position. The movement in imperative expressions has a lot of bearing on the status of morphology in EME.
- Subjects
SYNTAX (Grammar); IMPERATIVE (Grammar); EARLY modern English language; TENSE (Grammar); VERB phrases; ENGLISH linguistic morphology
- Publication
NAWA Journal of Language & Communication, 2016, Vol 10, Issue 1, p179
- ISSN
1993-3835
- Publication type
Article