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Imperative Mood

Table of contents

  1. Verb Mood
  2. Imperative Mood
    1. Irregular Imperatives
    2. Negative Imperatives

Verb Mood

Of the five aspects of the conjugated verb (person, number, tense, voice, and mood), we’ve worked primarily with the first four, and all of the conjugated verbs that we know how to form and translate are in the indicative mood.

The mood of a verb indicates how the speaker views the verb’s action.

  • If the verb’s action is definite, factual, or true to the speaker, then the verb’s mood is indicative.
  • If the verb’s action is a command, then the verb’s mood is imperative.
  • If the verb’s action is possible, doubtful, unreal, non-factual, or not definite, then the verb’s mood is subjunctive.

This unit focuses on the imperative mood; the next units (and indeed the remainder of the semester) will focus on the subjunctibve mood.


Imperative Mood

The imperative mood means that the speaker is issuing a command. It exists mostly in the 2nd person and issues an order from the speaker to the addressee. For example:

  • audī! Listen! (to a singular addressee) (2nd sg. pres. imperative act.)
  • audīte! Listen! (to a group of people) (2nd pl. pres. imperative act.)

The verbal action is a command being issued to the listener. The singular imperative commands a single addressee to do something; the plural imperative commands a group of addressees to do something.

To form the imperative of 1st, 2nd, and 4th conjugation verbs:

  • in the singular, simply chop the -re off the infinitive.
    • amāre - amā! “Love!”
    • sedēre - sedē! “Sit!”
    • audīre - audī! “Listen!”
  • in the plural, add -te to the singular imperative form.
    • amāte! “Love!” (to a plural group)
    • sedēte! “Sit!”
    • audīte! “Listen!”

To form the imperative of 3rd and 3rd -iō conjugation verbs:

  • in the singular, chop the -re off the infinitive, as in the other conjugations:
    • regere - rege! “Rule!”
    • capere - cape! “Take!”
  • but in the plural, change the stem vowel to -i- before adding the -te:
    • regite! “Rule!” (to a plural group)
    • capite! “Take!”

Take a look at the following examples.

  • epistulam scrībe! Write the letter!
  • verba eius audīte! Listen to his words!
  • dā mihi basia mille! Give a thousand kisses to me! (Catullus 5.7)

Irregular Imperatives

There are four verbs that have irregularly-formed singular imperatives:

  • dīcere - dīc! “Speak!”
  • dūcere - dūc! “Lead!”
  • facere - fac! “Do! / Make!”
  • ferre - fer! “Bring!”

Their plurals follow normal third and third -iō conjugation patterns, except for ferre:

  • dīcere - dīcite! “Speak!”
  • dūcere - dūcite! “Lead!”
  • facere - facite! “Do! / Make!”
  • ferre - ferte! “Bring!”

The imperative of the verb eō, īre, iī/īvī, ītus (“to go”) is formed as follows:

  • singular: ī! “Go!”
  • plural: īte! “Go!”

Negative Imperatives

To negate an imperative, we will not use the expected nōn (“not”), but rather, we will use a specific syntactic construction. To form a negative imperative, we use the imperative forms of nōlō, nōlle, nōluī with a complementary infinitive. The singular imperative of nōlō is nōlī; the plural imperative of nōlō is nōlīte.

  • nōlī timēre! Don’t be afraid!
  • nōlīte id aspicere. Don’t look at it!

All material developed by Daniel Libatique, Dominic Machado, and Neel Smith, and available under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license CC BY-SA 4.0