I noticed the other day that the verb ‘cost’ doesn’t seem to have an imperative. I find this an unusual property of the word and was wondering if there were any others. Also, is there a name for this?
It is possible to imagine bizarre (and frankly unnatural) constructions in which “cost” could be used as an imperative. “O table, cost five dollars so I can afford you.”
I don’t know of a name for a specific lack of an imperative, but in general a verb with an incomplete conjugation is called a “defective verb.” Latin is full of them. Malle (“to prefer”) and avere (“to be eager”), for example, have no imperative forms. In English, defective verbs are mostly auxiliary verbs, such as “can,” “may,” “ought,” etc.
I would use ‘cost’ as the imperative. But that is just me.
“Cost all the old stock at six dollars, the new stuff at seven.”
‘Beware’ is a defective verb, it has only an imperative.
“Born” seems to have to no imperative and so I suppose is also defective.
“Born” is technically a past participle, of “to bear” (meaning to give birth to). The homonymous “borne” is the past participle of “to bear” meaning “to carry.”
I was talking about the more common definitions, but that one does indeed have an imperative.
The bolded sense is not in imperative form.
Since the imperative form in English is just the same as the infinitive, the only verbs that lack the imperative are those that lack the infinitive. These are some irregulary auxiliary or modal verbs, e.g., “can”, “may”, “shall”, “will”. So, for example, you can’t say: “Can leave the room!”, though you might say: “Be able to leave the room!”, which has the same meaning.
Of course, semantically, there are many verbs that are odd in the imperative form, e.g., “rain” or “snow”, because people don’t rain or snow – though you might say “Rain today, please!” to a cloud.
Although that is ingenious, here in England I would say “Price all the old stock …”
There are no modal verbs in English. In the period between around 1550 and 1600, the modals stopped being verbs since they lost the ability to participate in the same structures that verbs can (for example, they cannot be governed by modals as they can in both French and German, to mention the only other languages I know of:
Ich kan gehen. Je peut aller. But “I must be able to go”. The same time period marked the rise of the periphrastic structures such as “be able to”. See David Lightfoot’s “Principles of Diachronic Grammar” for more details.
Here in America, it is too. I’ve never heard anyone ever tell me to “cost” something.
So, if “can”, “may”, “shall” and “will” aren’t verbs, what part of speech are they? Just because they lack some of the normal verb forms and structures doesn’t stop them from being verbs. The Wikipedia article on “modal verb” includes them as examples of modal verbs.
Accountants talk about “costing” things all the time. I suppose the imperative form crops up in professional discussions among CPAs.
There are plenty of people here frequently using the imperative mood of the verb “to rain”. And not politely.