Let-imperatives in English

• Autores: Peter Collins
• Localización: International journal of corpus linguistics, ISSN-e 1569-9811, ISSN 1384-6655, Vol. 9, Nº 2, 2004, págs. 299-320
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This paper reports the findings of a corpus-based study oflet-imperatives in English. Unlike the ordinary lexical verbletmeaning "allow", theletoflet-imperatives serves merely to mark illocutionary meaning. In "first person inclusives", the variant with us-contraction is found to have increased in popularity over recent decades. Furthermore the occurrence of cases wherelet'scan not be interpreted as a contraction oflet ussuggests that syntactic reanalysis has reached an advanced stage amongst some speakers. "Open"let-imperatives, which despite their distinctively optative or deontic-assertive force are grammatically closer to ordinary imperatives, are found to have decreased in popularity in recent decades.