The Origin of Language by Eric Gans

Author:Eric Gans
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781949966138
Published: 2019-01-29T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7.

The Imperative I

Linguistics, even in our post-Chomskian era, still takes NP + VP as the fundamental form of the sentence; anything less is a “defective” transformation. But once we attempt to explain how à partir de rien NP became associated with VP, we discover that this synchronic model not only does not provide us with an answer, but does not even permit us to ask the question. Thus the foundation of one of the most advanced human sciences is surrounded by a taboo even more constraining than those of primitive religion, which at least attempts through etiological myths to explain the origins of cultural forms.

If traditional grammar does not recognize the existence of the ostensive as a distinct utterance form, it is willing to grant syntactic status to the imperative as a poor relation of the declarative sentence. Although the imperative has no true tense, its verbal form may be considered a sort of immediate future. Similarly, although its nearly universal zero-morphology attests to an apparent ignorance of the category of person, it can generally be classified functionally with the second person. We need not concern ourselves for the moment with the obviously derivative third- or first-person forms (Let him; Let’s).

From our perspective, the imperative is characterized not by “defective” but by nascent grammaticality, which we shall define as a linguistic form’s degree of self-containment or “context-free-ness,” considered as an intentional model of reality. From this definition, the situation of the imperative on the grammatical scale between the ostensive and the declarative follows immediately. The ostensive is meaningless in the absence of its referent; the declarative can do without a real-world referent. The imperative operates in the absence of its object-nominal or -verbal, but can be satisfied only upon the object’s being made present. The declarative stands at the end of the scale of grammaticality as the telos of linguistic evolution, after which no substantial progress is possible. This explains, if it does not excuse, the grammarians’ inclination to treat all other forms as imperfect declaratives irrespective of their evolutionary status.

As we have noted, the ostensive makes no formal distinction between verbals and nominals; because verbality proper is a quality of predicates, the very term “verbal” is at this stage an anachronism. If the ostensive “Run!” designates the presence of running, the imperative “Run!” would similarly request running from the interlocutor, indifferently by asking him to run or “do a run.” The “nominality” or substantivity of this object obtains in principle because only as a substance capable of being an independent object of the imagination can it become an object of desire. Yet the fact that in mature languages the imperative is always considered to be a form of the verb, and that nominal imperatives like “Scalpel!” are categorized, if at all, as elliptical forms of the verbal imperative (“[give me the] scalpel!”), cannot simply be attributed to the perversity of grammarians. What it demonstrates is that by subordinating the appearance of the desired object to the action of the interlocutor, the imperative has already taken a major step in the direction of predication.

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