Preliminary of the Imperative in the Japreria language (original) (raw)

Durbind and Seijas (1975) and Villalón (1987) fail to point out that Japreria may be a language different from Yukpa, the other Cariban language spoken in "Sierra de Perijá". They classify Japreria as a dialect of Yukpa. But , in my paper "Is Japreria a dialect of Yukpa ? (1998) , I try to demonstrate that Japreria has developed independently from Yukpa with regard to submorphemic units of the kinship system , the pronominal system, and the lexicon. The aim in this work is to describe the use of the imperative in Japreria and to compare its structure to the interrogative form. I analyzed twenty verbs in Japreria language. In the interrogative form in the present tense the addressee is manifested but not in the imperative form, contrary to the explanation of Manning (1996 :7) who wrote : " For semantic reasons certain grammatical processes will universally pick out this notion of (deep) subject regardless of the surface pivot of the Language. This the addressee of imperative ." The prominence of the addressee in the Japreria interrogative form constitutes the difference with regard to the structure of the imperative. My tentative conclusion is that in the imperative construction of the Japreria language the prominence of the addressee is pragmatic.