Let-imperatives in English

Abstract

This paper reports the findings of a corpus-based study oflet-imperatives in English. Unlike the ordinary lexical verbletmeaning “allow”, theletoflet-imperatives serves merely to mark illocutionary meaning. In ‘first person inclusives’, the variant with us-contraction is found to have increased in popularity over recent decades. Furthermore the occurrence of cases wherelet'scan not be interpreted as a contraction oflet ussuggests that syntactic reanalysis has reached an advanced stage amongst some speakers. ‘Open’let-imperatives, which despite their distinctively optative or deontic-assertive force are grammatically closer to ordinary imperatives, are found to have decreased in popularity in recent decades.