Metaphorical use of the Russian imperative

Abstract

The ‘historical’ or ‘narrative’ (also: ‘transposed’) use of an imperative instead of a verb in the indicative mood is a common feature of colloquial Russian. Some scholars explain it as a relic of old aorist forms, others define a general lexical meaning of the imperative as the reason for its use both in proper imperative as well as in improper indicative meaning. Focusing on the specific Russian features of the narrative imperative, the present paper adduces new evidence supporting the hypothesis of the aoristic origin. It is shown that the semantics of the narrative imperative conveys ‘simultaneity’ with respect to the tense of the syntactic construction the imperative is embedded in. ‘Simultaneity’ is also the prototypical meaning of the aorist which has been defined as ‘present of the past’. Furthermore, it is pointed out that the change from imperative to indicative mood can be coherently explained in terms of a cognitive theory of metaphor.