Is this an imperative sentence?
Rise to the top 3% as a developer or hire one of them at Toptal: https://topt.al/25cXVn
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Track title: Puzzle Game 3
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Chapters
00:00 Is This An Imperative Sentence?
00:16 Answer 1 Score 5
00:53 Accepted Answer Score 11
01:51 Thank you
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Tags
#conditionals #imperatives
#avk47
ACCEPTED ANSWER
Score 11
It's a complex situation.
Sentences like the presenting one are clearly intended to urge, if not impose, some kind of behavior on the addressee (though the addressee in this case is only a generic you, the same sense as one, but faluting a couple levels lower).
So in that they are like imperatives. However, it can be shown (as I do in my paper) that they aren't real imperatives, syntactically. They must be a different construction, mimicking an imperative. It's clear that the construction does have some conditional meaning --
- (If) you hang around with riffraff like the Weasleys and that Hagrid,
- (Then) it’ll rub off on you.
which is the beginning of a Modus Ponens syllogism:
- ((p Implies q) And p) Implies q | ((p ⊃ q) ⋀ p) ⊃ q
The second line is implied in context, and the conclusion follows.
An extreme case of this is
- Buy 10 and Save! (almost always with an exclamation point)
which means something like (boldfaced omissions)
- If you buy 10
[count noun]
s, then you will save some money.
ANSWER 2
Score 5
It could conceivably be read as an imperative (or, more correctly, an impositive as John Lawler explains in the comments):
[Go and] hang around with riffraff like the Weasleys and that Hagrid, and it’ll rub off on you.
But given the context, it's unlikely that the speaker meant it as a command. (After all - who would command someone to go get bad influences from riffraff?) It's more likely to be interpreted as a conditional:
[If] you hang around with riffraff like the Weasleys and that Hagrid,
andit’ll rub off on you.