THE LIVONIAN JUSSIVE: PERSON AND FUNCTION

Alongside the imperative proper, Livonian has developed a secondary indirect imperative paradigm referred to as the jussive. The category of person is the most controversial category concerning imperatives. The scope of the functions of imperatives has also received a lot of attention. This study focuses on the distribution of the person forms of the Livonian jussive and the covariance between function and person. Jussive occurrences from two corpora have been analysed for person and function, cross-referenced, and analysed for prototypicality of function. The Livonian jussive is most frequently used in the third person, but all person forms are attested. All forms occur in prototypical and non-prototypical imperative functions, but the first-person forms are used more frequently for non-prototypical functions, while other forms are used more often for prototypical functions. The results suggest that prototypicality might be determined both by mood as well as person, meaning that prototypical imperative functions might be different for every person.