Functional Analysis Of Imperatives

Decades ago, linguists and scholars began to study imperatives. Many researches have been focused on the functions of imperatives. Although many linguists and scholars have studied the functions of imperatives, different scholars set different analyzing criteria, so it hasn't come to an agreement about what are expressed in imperatives or what functions are performed by imperatives. This thesis aims to provide a way to solve this problem.In order to analyze the functions of imperatives properly, besides the linguistic variables, we must take non-linguistic variables into account, because these variables play important roles in determining the functions of imperatives. We think the contextual variables taking part in performing imperatives include: the speaker, who issues the imperatives; the addressee, who performs the proposed action; the action itself; the purpose and the basis to issue the imperatives; the status of the speaker and the addressee; whose interest the fulfillment of the proposed action serves; whether the addressee has the option or not; the reason why the proposed action is carried out; consequence of the addressee's disobedience; accompanied intonation and body languages. Each of these variables will influence the functions of imperatives.According to these contextual variables, we claim that imperatives possess order category functions, request category functions, advice category functions, criticism category functions, and answer category functions. This thesis gives full descriptions about the implicature of all these functions based on a great number of examples. We expect the findings of this thesis will be helpful for the further studies and the understanding of imperatives and helpful for the language teaching.