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539 Glossary for any unfamiliar terms

Grammar and academic English | 287

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IMPERATIVES AND RHETORICAL QUESTIONS

149

Imperatives

Imperatives occur in academic contexts most typically when the reader/listener is

invited to consider or pay particular attention to something. 

Some verbs in the imperative are particularly common in written texts. These

include consider, note, notice, observe, recall, remember, see:

For example, 

consider the way people often construe behaviour problems in

boys who do and who do not have mental retardation. 

[text linguistics lecture]

But the grammatical subject is also the agent, that is if the subject is doing

something to the object. Okay. 

Remember, the grammatical subject is not

always the agent.

Let us

, and in spoken contexts let’s, are also common in academic discourse to

direct a collective focus of attention on the part of writer(s)/speaker and

readers/listeners:

First, 

let us perform a comparative examination of two examples.

[lecture on the alimentary system]

So 

let’s look now at their targets and in particular the dietary carbohydrates. 

First person let me is also common when the speaker/writer is signalling 

some upcoming aspect of the text. It is similar in function to I shall/I will

(

Û

above, 144e

):

[referring to the William Shakespeare play, Romeo and Juliet]

With all this context in mind,

let me return to the final scene of ‘Romeo and

Juliet’ and to my questions (1) and (3): what would an audience in the mid

1590s actually have seen; and, equally important, so what?