| Summary: | The article studies the imperative, one of the most significant linguistic means of expression of incentive in the German language. Traditionally the imperative belongs to forms of a verbal mood and is a morphological unit. Forming a special type of the sentence, an incentive sentence, the imperative can also be recognized as a syntax unit. The paradigm of the imperative in a narrow sense consists of the forms of the 2nd person singular and plural. In a broad sense it also includes polite forms (with Sie pronoun) and forms of joint action (with wir pronoun). From the semantic point of view, the imperative has such features as deictivity, controllability of action, beneficiation, subordination, aim-orientation and futurity. The imperative is involved in the considerable repertoire of speech acts. In the studied corpus of examples extracted from direct speech of characters of fictional discourse it is frequent in such speech acts of incentive character as request, advice, demand, order, permission, offer, invitation and some other. Besides, it is widespread in the contactive and metacommunicative speech acts which are characterized by the blurred imperativeness. In rare cases the imperative can be involved in the non-incentive speech acts of the modal-evaluative and informing character.
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