DERIVATIONAL POTENTIAL OF THE DRAMATIC IMPERATIVE IN CONTEMPORARY RUSSIAN (CORPUS STUDY)

This article is dedicated to analyzing the usage and derivational potential of forms of the Russian imperative mood, capable of functioning in various types of contexts. Particular attention is given to the dramatic (narrative) imperative, whose forms express the completion of an unexpected action in the past and are used in special constructions—with the conjunctive particles “i”, “da i”, and the auxiliary imperative form “voz’mi” with these particles (a on voz’mi da i otkazhis’). The sample of examples of dramatic imperative usage from the National Corpus of the Russian Language includes more than 520 contexts, obtained using a set of specially developed formulas for the Corpus. The analysis of the examples demonstrated that the dramatic imperative differs from the actual imperative (with inciting semantics) not only in meaning (expressing an unexpected action in the past) and in functional type (used in narrative texts outside of incitement situations) but in several other parameters as well. Unlike the inciting imperative, the dramatic imperative does not have semantic restrictions on filling the actant position of the action’s subject—the subject can be not only a human (or their simulation) but also an object or an abstract concept. Accordingly, the lexical-semantic groups of verbs from which forms of the dramatic imperative are derived are not limited to the semantics of purposeful and controlled action but can also include verbs with meanings of uncontrollable and accidental actions, including those typical only for objects. Moreover, the dramatic imperative is associated with the aspectual semantics of perfective verbs only. These functional-semantic and derivational differences of the dramatic imperative from the categorical type of formation and use of imperative mood forms (in inciting situations) do not correspond to typical cases of transposition of grammatical forms and can be considered a special type of indirect use of imperative forms.