Re: THEORY: third-person imperatives

Lars Henrik Mathiesen wrote:
> Call the "let"-construction a 3rd person imperative if you must, but I
> still think it's just an optative/hortative construction.
I thought of something.  Could third-person "imperatives" be rephrased
as second-person imperatives, with the "commandee" in the vocative?  For
instance, take the earlier example of "Let the word go forth ...",
suppose it were stated as "word-VOC go.forth-IMP" in some language.  Can
any one see any problems with that?  I suppose that that wouldn't
properly be a vocative, since you're not actually *addressing* the
"word", but it seems reasonable that a case could be used.  Perhaps this
could even be applied to first person pronouns (us-VOC go.forth-IMP)

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