Imperative markers: A comparison of monolingual and bilingual early language acquisition

‘Bare’ verbs are in abundance in early acquisition data. The presence of these verbs is one of the reasons for hypothesizing the lack of agreement inflections or projections in early language acquisition theories. The affirmative, singular, imperative form is the only 'bare' form in the adult grammar and we argue that child grammar is no different (Lakshmanan, 2006). The bare forms in the data are not really bare. It provides clues to how the grammar is organized internally and how the typologies of the languages that a child is exposed to might influence early utterances.Imperatives are produced as an order, command or request. Usually, these productions in children are accompanied by gestures or a peak in intonation (Sarma, 1999). Cross-linguistically, imperatives are morphologically sparse (Schwager, 2011). The subject of an imperative is optional even in languages that require them ordinarily, for example, English. In this paper, we focus on the morphological marking of the imperative mood and not the periphrastic imperative structures. Drawing on evidence from longitudinal monolingual and bilingual first language acquisition data, we will argue that typological differences play out differently in monolingual and bilingual inflectional development taking Malayalam and English imperatives as cases in point. We shall attempt to explain the occurrence of certain imperative forms in the language context by tracing the differences and similarities in the spontaneous acquisition data of two monolingual children and one bilingual child.