The imperative in the vernacular of the Sirinić Župa in the north Šar Mountains

Abstract

This paper analyzes the use of the imperative in the vernacular of the Sirinić Župa in the north Šar Mountains. The corpus of this dialect indicates that the imperative functions as a syntactic unit with a broad syntactic and semantic range. Syntactic, semantic and stylistic features of the imperative are determined on the basis of its primary modal meaning, but also on the basis of its secondary meaning when it refers to single or habitual actions in the past, which are typically repetitive. It turned out that the imperative is stable in all three functional domains of the same vernacular and that it is not suppressed by isofunctional units, i.e. those with similar syntactic or semantic features. Finally, it was found that the imperative has an expressive value when it undergoes temporal transposition, which makes it a stylogenic unit. [Project of the Serbian Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development, Grant no. 178020: Dijalektološka istraživanja srpskog jezičkog prostora]

Keywords

• imperative
• modal meaning
• temporal transposition
• single action in the past
• repeated action in the past