THE “CONDITIONAL” IMPERATIVE AND INTERSUBJECTIVE RELATIONS

Abstract

This paper will focus on a complex sentence type in which the imperative verb form is not used in its prototypical function to perform directive speech acts like a command, order, request, but is interpreted as conditional. The coordinated structures A(i) and B, where A(i) corresponds to the imperative sentence and B to the declarative one, are analyzed on material from Bulgarian and French examples and some regularities are established (restricted word order, lack of surface subject, conjunctions dynamizing the impact on the predicative relation, etc.) that determine specific intersubjective relations.