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Journal of Humanities, Arts and Social Science

ISSN Online: 2576-0548 ISSN Print: 2576-0556 CODEN: JHASAY
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ArticleOpen Access http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/jhass.2026.05.001

From Imperatives to Discourse: A Review of Imperative-based Discourse Markers

Jiahui Wang

Qingdao University of Science and Technology, Qingdao 266000, Shandong, China.

*Corresponding author: Jiahui Wang

Published: May 15, 2026

Abstract

Discourse markers derived from imperative verb forms, such as English look, listen, wait, hold on, and hang on, constitute a theoretically significant subtype of pragmatic markers, here termed imperative-based discourse markers (IBDMs). Through grammaticalization or pragmaticalization, these forms develop from directive propositional meaning to procedural functions and begin to regulate turn-taking, initiate repair, and encode speaker stance. This paper critically reviews the existing studies on IBDMs across four dimensions. They are theoretical frameworks, grammaticalization mechanisms, cross-linguistic distribution, and interactional functions. The review demonstrates that the imperative-to-discourse-marker pathway is a robust cross-linguistic tendency.  This paper examined three theoretical debates, which are the degree of grammaticalization across individual forms, the relationship between grammaticalization and pragmaticalization, and the boundary between directive imperative and discourse marker. A critical gap is the absence of multi-variant comparative analysis of formally similar but potentially functionally differentiated forms.

Keyword

Discourse markers; grammaticalization; pragmaticalization; imperatives

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© 2026 by the author(s).
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) license, which permits non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not modified or adapted.
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How to cite this paper

From Imperatives to Discourse: A Review of Imperative-based Discourse Markers

How to cite this paper: Jiahui Wang. (2026) From Imperatives to Discourse: A Review of Imperative-based Discourse Markers. Journal of Humanities, Arts and Social Science10(5), 518-522.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/jhass.2026.05.001