Traditional structural accounts have dealt with grammar at the sub sentential and sentential levels. For example, at the sub sentential level, the level below that of the sentence, verb tenses have been described through the use of verb tense morphology. In the case of English, verb tense morphology consists of auxiliary verbs and certain suffixes or word endings such as -ing. | 228 The Grammar Book liven our attempt in this teacher s text to be comprehensive we intend to show that the status difference between speaker and listener is only one of the factors that plays a role in determining when imperatives are used. The late rock idol Elvis Presley s plea to laive me tender seems a far cry from a military bark nonetheless his plea and the military order above share a common syntactic form. Sociolinguistic factors governing use of imperatives are investigated in the use section which follows our analysis of their form and meaning. The Form of Imperatives You have just seen how the fact that imperatives are snbjectless presents us with a dilemma as far as our phrase structure rule for S. We could of course modify our phrase structure rule for S by putting parentheses around the SL BJ thus signifying its optionality. However our intuition tells us that a subject actually does underlie imperative sentences it simply does not usually Traditional grammarians have referred to the underlying subject of imperative sentences as the understood you. In other words the subject of an unmarked form of an imperative is the second person singular or plural subject pronoun you. You listen up While such an explanation is intuitively satisfying we can go even further and use syntactic evidence to corroborate the traditional grammarians assertion that an understood you is the subject of an imperative. Athough we do not fully examine reflexive pronouns until Chapter 16 suffice it to say here that the object of a reflexive verb must be identical in reference to the subject of the same sentence that is in the following sentence Ann and the reflexive pronoun herself are co-rcferential they refer to the same person Ann prided herself on her accomplishments. Now notice the form of the reflexive pronoun when it occurs in object position in an imperative. Watch yourself. Watch yourselves If basic structure subjects oilier than second person singular or .
