Well this brings me back to the horrors of grammar classes taught by Sister Martin. But the subject of an imperative sentence is always you.

You'll find a lot more bad syntax written by people without Ph.Ds in linguistics with a quick google search on linguistic topics than you'll find accurate information, so I'll look and see what I can find but what I'm claiming certainly makes a lot of intuitive sense-- when you have one person giving a command to another person, the person giving the command should be the subject and the person receiving the command should be the direct object.

There isn't too much of a semantic difference between "I want you to wash the dishes" and "wash the dishes". My take is that in imperatives the "I want you..." part is just null, which is something that happens a lot in language. Again I'll look into it because I enjoy this stuff.

"Imperative sentences are used to express commands/orders or requests and also to give instructions or some advice. Imperative sentences do not require a subject. Furthermore, remember that the verb used in an imperative sentence should always be in the simple present tense."

Here is an example of bad syntax being taught with a quick search. ALL english sentences require a subject. This is why we say stuff like "It's raining". Wtf is "it" there? It's an dummy subject that we introduce to make it function.

*https://www.cambridge.org/core/books...1FADBEA94F678E

This looks promising.

likewise, I dont find much difference between "I want them all to be killed" and "I hate them more than anyone else and I would not care if they all were killed".

Sorry to take this further off topic, but the Luckbox implication here sounds more like expressing a desire than issuing a command. I agree that the implied sinner subject of a command is you.

"(You must) get out of here with that crap."

https://www.researchgate.net/publica...st_Perspective

Here is a paper that's accessible

Holy ****! I always wondered what types of things English Phd candidates chose for their dissertations. I figured there wasnt much left to figure out about Shakespeare and other great writers. But god damn, that's one esoteric paper.

Essentially they're arguing that a theory of imperatives deserves a special place within Chomskian syntax (or more accurately what is called the "Minimalist Program") which is basically the idea that if there is a such a thing as a "Universal Grammar" that underlies all human language, then the theories that underlie it need to be as basic as possible to account for the large amount of variation that exist in the 7,000+ extant languages.

Most of the stuff that you'll find the most esoteric is what is called X bar theory, which is basically just a way of understanding tree diagrams.

When we diagram sentences the nodes on the diagram are what are called "phrases". E.g., a verb phrase ("paint the fence"), which contains the verb "paint" and the noun phrase (or more accurately the determiner phrase) "the fence". There are also adjective phrases, prepositional phrases and other more exotic phrases like "topic phrase" ("As for the fence I'd like it painted")-- where "as for the fence" would be the topic phrase.

Languages can either be subject prominent or topic prominent. English and all other languages dervied from Indo-European are subject prominent, but languages like Japanese and Korean are topic prominent. In Japanese you begin with the topic first and then say what you want to say about it.

You would't say "I like beer" in Japanese (you could), but more natural would be something like:

"biru-wa suki desu" (as for beer, like is), where there is no subject but it's assumed to be the speaker and could be translated as "I like beer")-- but when you diagram the Japanese sentence it's going to look very different from its Engish counterpart because it's beginning with the topic whereas English begins with the subject.

But since according to the ideas of Universal Grammar we know there must only be one schema that accounts for all languages, then we know that English still does have a "topic phrase" slot just that it's not often filled.

Their argument is that just like the topic-phrase slot, that there is also an "Imperative phrase" that would fit somewhere (between "Force" and "Topic") in figure 3 of that paper, and they go through and give a history of other theories of imperatives and make their arguments for why such an "Imperative phrase" exists.

Not sure how I could have been more respectful there, given said it with the upmost respect.

lol. Nothing respectful has ever, in the history of the universe, even in the languages no one in the US even knows what they are, followed the phrase "with all due respect" or its variations.

With all due respect, browser, that's an excellent point.

"Due" is the operative word there. The speaker might well feel that the amount of respect due is, in fact, none.

Since you've gone all Conan the Grammarian, you might want note for future reference that it's "utmost".

Hi fellow grammar enthusiast.

Upmost is shortened from uppermost, meaning at the top. An example would be something like “Learning the difference between utmost and upmost should be you’re upmost priority, and I mean that with the utmost respect.”

Thanks I do appreciate that and I did feel like something was off with that word choice but there was no squiggly red line so I went with it.

Discussions like these always bring me back to the time mets argued for his life that “could care less” was the accurate phrasing. Poor guy.

It's one of those unfortunate phrases that you just have to avoid altogether. If you say "could care less" you'll get a bunch of smart asses telling that it's "could care more", and if you say "could care more" people are going to look at you funny.

I can’t tell if you’re joking… Its “couldn’t care less”.

Yeah that means that you're caring so much that it's impossible to care less. "Could care less" also means you still care, just that you could care some lesser amount. Both are flawed.

Lol no. See if you can spot your error with the aid of the diagram below.

If we consult the COCA -- https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/ , located there and go based solely on usage, then there are 1226 hits for "could care less" and only 113 hits for "couldn't care less".

Ummm.. Anyone can produce a diagram.

It's a visual aid to help you help yourself. Hint: you're wrong. I'll let you work the rest out.

Hint 2: "x is so large it is impossible for x to be smaller". Spot the error.

Both interpretations work. That's why some languages use double negatives and some don't.

No. They don't. You're dead wrong.