Re: past tense imperative

On Saturday, April 16, 2005, at 11:17 , caeruleancentaur wrote:

> René Uittenbogaard wrote:
> A couple of days ago, I was struck by an interesting grammatical
> construction in Dutch. Dutch has a construction in which an
> imperative can be used in the past perfect:
>
> Had dat dan gezegd! - You should have told me so!
> Was dan niet gegaan! - You shouldn't have gone!
>
> Max:
> present -> travaille! = work!
> past -> ai travaillé! = ~have worked!~ (would it really mean
> something in english?)
> In a full sentence, it could be:
> Toi! Ai travaillé quand je serai revenu! = You! I want you to have
> worked when I'll be back.
[etc snipped]

> I never before thought of the construction "have + direct object +
> past participle" as a past imperative, but it looks that way to me
> now.  The construction is used frequently in English:
> Have the car repaired and I will pay for it.
> Have your room cleaned by the time I return.
o, no - these are not _past_ imperatives - which doesn't make sense (see
below) - they are _perfect_ imperatives, i.e. imperatives in the perfect
aspect.

Ancient Greek had three sets of imperatives; traditionally they are called:
present imperative - formed on the so-called 'present stem' - imperfective
aspect.
aorist imperative - formed on the 'aorist' stem - punctual aspect
perfect imperative - formed on the perfect stem - perfect aspect

Punctual and perfect are subdivisions of the perfective aspect. The
punctual is confined to a single instant of time, the perfect denoting a
state arising from a former event.

>
> How do others parse this construction?  Present imperative + direct
> object + complement?  It does have a future perfect feel about it.
> The response would be something like, "Yes, I will have my room
> cleaned by the time you return."  Or, "...I will have cleaned my
> room...."
Yes, of course. Imperatives per_se do have a future reference - normally
the next momemt  :)
Be quiet! shut the door! sit down! etc

The perfect imperative - Have your room cleaned - is a command to bring
about a certain state in the future which results from the action(s) the
commandee [sorry!] has done.

Unless it is possible to travel back in time and effect change, past
imperatives do not make sense.

The French example above is clearly a perfect imperative:
Toi! Ai travaillé quand je serai revenu! You! Have your work done by the
time I get back!
The difference seems to be that we have this idiom in English only when
the participle is passive and we can formally make the noun/pronoun the
actual object of have (which is how the perfect tenses started out).

The Dutch examples, however, seem to be something different from the
English & French examples. If it were the same, we should be able to
translate the first sentence as "Have that said!" - we can't. They seem
correspond to the somewhat literary:
O that you had said so! (Had dat dan gezegd!)
O that you had not gone! (Was dan niet gegaan!)

Ancient Greek did this with the aorist _indicative_ preceded by either
_eithe_ or _ei gar_. Latin used the pluperfect subjunctive, optionally
preceded by _utinam_
eithe touto eipes -  Quod (utinam) dixisses!
eithe me: ebe:s  - (Utinam) ne adiisses!

They express a desire or wish that something has been so in the past, i.e.
  the Dutch sentences - if I have understood them correctly - do refer to
the past. But they are not 'past tense imperatives', in the strict sense
of these words, as that would not make sense. Nor, as I understand it, are
they the perfect imperatives that may occur in some languages.

What we have, it seems to me, is the use of imperatives of 'to have' to
'to be' + perfect participle in expressing a desire or wish that things
had been different in the past. Dutch uses the imperative mood, ancient
Greek used a past tense of the indicative mood & Latin a past tense of the
subjunctive mood.

René is right - it is interesting. I wonder how we do this in our various
conlangs  :)

Ray
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