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.
2013. Grammatical variation in English worldwide. Linguistics and the Human Sciences 8:3 ► pp. 289 ff.
Collins, Peter
2020. Clause Types. In The Handbook of English Linguistics, ► pp. 131 ff.
Collins, Peter & Xinyue Yao
2019. AusBrown: A new diachronic corpus of Australian English. ICAME Journal 43:1 ► pp. 5 ff.
Dobrushina, Nina
2019. Статус конструкций с частицами пусть и пускай в русском языке. Russian Linguistics 43:1 ► pp. 1 ff.
EunJooLee
2008. An analysis of corpus-based research on TEFL and applied linguistics.. English Teaching 63:2 ► pp. 283 ff.
Hoey, Elliott M.
2022. Self-authorizing action: Onlet me Xin English social interaction. Language in Society 51:1 ► pp. 95 ff.
Kim, Ahrim & Iksoo Kwon
2020. Hortatives, imperatives, and the directive speech-act continuum: A usage-based approach to the Korean -ca hortative construction. Lingua 245 ► pp. 102928 ff.
Magnusson, Lynne
2020. Construing Literary Texts, Constructing Linguistic History. English Literary Renaissance 50:1 ► pp. 93 ff.
Neiderhiser, Justine A., Patrick Kelley, Kohlee M. Kennedy, John M. Swales & Carla Vergaro
2016. ‘Notice the Similarities between the Two Sets …’: Imperative Usage in a Corpus of Upper-Level Student Papers. Applied Linguistics 37:2 ► pp. 198 ff.
Ronan, Patricia
2022. Directives and Politeness in SPICE-Ireland. Corpus Pragmatics 6:2 ► pp. 175 ff.
Sansiñena, María Sol, Hendrik De Smet & Bert Cornillie
2015. Displaced directives: Subjunctive free-standing que-clauses vs. imperatives in Spanish. Folia Linguistica 49:1
2018. The Semantics of MOOD and the Syntax of the Let’s-construction in English: A Corpus-based Cardiff Grammar Approach. Australian Journal of Linguistics 38:4 ► pp. 549 ff.
서샛별 & Semoon Hoe
2015. Agreement of a Point-of-Viewer and a Jussive Subject. Studies in Generative Grammar 25:1 ► pp. 1 ff.
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