Taking orders from a plaque

This is a plaque that I bought my mum for Christmas.

This text is constituted by a series of imperative clauses. Imperative sentence types have distinctive syntactical structure and are utilised much less frequently than declaratives or even interrogatives. They are characterised by an omission of a subject pronoun preceding the verb, therefore it is essential that the subject of the verb is either aforementioned or understood by the context (via eye contact or other paralinguistic features of spoken language). Generally speaking, the conjugation of the imperative verb is that of the present tense 2^nd person singular. Therefore, in this written context, the reader is able to ascertain that they are the subject. The omission of the subject pronoun and subsequent verb – a part of speech which functions to denote an action of some variant - creates a sense of urgency within the clause. In actuality one needs not to look much further than the etymology of the word ‘imperative’ itself to obtain this notion. (think of the word imperial, meaning of or relating to an empire). Aesthetically speaking, the vertical arrangement of the text enhances the list-like and commanding nature connoted by the utilisation of the imperatives, but the actual jargon constituting these clauses counteracts this somewhat. It would be bizarre to have a military lieutenant screaming at you to “LIVE LIKE HEAVEN ON EARTH” as they would when running a drill. In this situation, the context and register seeks to lessen the harshness of these imperatives from obligatory commands to the good natured advice of a loving friend or family member.

The first verb of each of the imperatives has been formatted to be considerably larger than the subsequent clauses below them and this functions to connote to the audience that these initial verbs themselves form the crux of the text.

“Dance as if no one is watching” and “sing as if no one can hear” are imperative verbs each followed by a subordinate or dependent clause which commence with the subordinating conjunction “as if”. In the first, second, third, sixth, seventh and eight lines, the preposition “like” functions as a subordinating conjunction by establishing the relationship between the dependent clause and the verb. Technically speaking, or rather, prescriptively speaking, it would be considered more syntactically sophisticated to utilise “as though” or “as if” instead of “like”. “Till”, utilised in the ninth line is also a subordinating conjunction. The ninth line is an example of a phrase that could be regarded as somewhat idiomatic and should definitely be taken non-literally.

This text achieves cohesiveness through the perpetual pleasantness of the jargon constituting the imperatives. As well as through the syntactical parallelism existing in the monosyllabic nature of the initial verbs in each line followed by an elaboratry subordinate clause.

The tenth line is somewhat of an oddity within this text is it differs from the rest of the imperatives in its syllabics and also in the lack of a subsequent dependent clause. Its syntactical divergence from the previous nine lines of the text enables it to stand out and aids in facilitating a notion of finality to the text.