The number of grammatical moods very depending on the viewpoint of a scientist and his way of approaching the problem. Moods are usually divided into direct or indirect or oblique.
The indicative and the imperative moods are considered to be direct because they directly denote the fact of an action or that another person is directly addressed and useed to fulfill a certain action.
So the indicative mood expresses real actions from the speakers point of view.
The imperative mood is the form of a verb used to express commands or requests. If the indicative mood has the greatest number of forms, the i mperative mood has the fewest. Since it expresses requests or commands it has no tense forms, because there is no sense, for example, in requests or commands directed to the past. Commands or requests may be only in two forms: in the affirmative and in the negative.
21)The Imperative. Its morphological peculiarities. Non-recognition of the imperative mood. The problem of the «let us go» type
Almost all grammarians recognize the existence of the imperative mood but its existence is open to discussion. At any rate this mood has such peculiarities which set it apart from all the other moods. Its main peculiarities are:
1. It has no tense forms while all the other moods have;
2. The imperative mood does not express the category of person;
3. It is not correlative with the interrogative sentence while the forms of all the other moods may be used both in declarative and interrogative sentences.
These peculiarities make it very doubtful whether it is necessary to recognize the imperative constructions as a mood. Perhaps it is more correct to point out that the imperative construction is a special communicative type of a sentence but not a mood. Besides it expresses modality of a whole sentence but not modality of the verb predicate. This means that the modality of such imperative constructions is expressed by intonation and sentence structure and it is not expressed by the form of mood.
Some grammarians find the analytical imperative mood in Let+Infmitive. e.g. Let us go, etc. in which let is an auxiliary word.
It is hardly possible to share this point of view, because the verb to let here is not deprived of its lexical meaning hence it is not an auxiliary verb and we have no ground to speak of an analytical form of the Imperative mood. In the sentence s Let me have that book or Let him go there, etc. we shall find different shades of meaning in the verb to let, so it cannot be the auxiliary verb to form the analytical imperative mood.
However Professor Vorontsova in support of her point of view adduces an example: Let's let him go. She proves easily that in this case the first verb let is devoid of any lexical meaning and therefore the whole combination may be taken as an analytical form. But very often let preserves its meaning and in the sentence Let him go, let may be substituted for the verb allow. Allow him to go. Hence here there is no analytical form.
Let + Infinitive presents something intermediate between the analytical form of the imperative mood and a phrase and is perhaps on its way to become an auxiliary word especially with the first person plural.
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