Talk:Cohortative mood

Recreated this article

The existing article had little to do with the cohortative and was mostly just a series of observations on hortatives in general with some incorrect information. I have deleted the information below and replaced it with a definition and examples of this mood. Perhaps this information from the old article could be reincorporated back in, where valid and encyclopeadic:

The cohortative mood (also known as Intentional; "cohortative subjunctive" is also synonymous with "hortatory subjunctive") is a grammatical mood, used to express plea, insistence, imploring, self-encouragement, wish, desire, intent, command, purpose or consequence. It is similar to the jussive mood, with the notable exception that the cohortative appears only in first person, whereas the jussive appears in second or third. Cohortatives are found in Hebrew. In several other languages that lack a specifically cohortative mood, there are corresponding expressions with approximately cohortative meaning. For example, Ancient Greek uses first person subjunctives (anachoreusōmen Bakchion, "let us dance for Bacchus," Euripides, Bacchae 1153). In English an equivalent idea may be expressed by a verbal auxiliary such as "let" (a usage which must not be confused with the more usual sense "allow, permit").

The hortative mood and the exhortative mood are largely synonymous with this, although sometimes distinctions are made. When distinctions are made, together they are called "hortative moods". See Johan van der Auwera, Nina Dobrushina, Valentin Goussev, "A Semantic Map for Imperative-Hortatives", in Dominique Willems, Bart Defrancq, Timothy Colleman & Dirk Noël(eds.) Points of Comparison in Linguistics: from Morphology to Discourse. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan for some discussion of when these distinctions are made.

Hortatory subjunctive in politics

In defending misconduct allegations as administrator of the General Services Administration at a 13 June 2007 hearing of the United States House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Lurita Doan stated that she "thought she was using like a hortatory subjunctive right there" when she told the United States Office of Special Counsel earlier under oath, "Until extensive rehabilitation of their performance occurs, they will not be getting promoted, they will not be getting bonuses or special awards or anything of that nature." U.S. Rep. John Sarbanes disagreed saying this was "clearly the [common] future tense" adding that the "best example of the use of hortatory subjunctive" is when she allegedly said (in violation of the rule of law, specifically the Hatch Act), "How can we help our candidates?" at a 26 January 2007 GSA meeting, which he defined as "an exhortation in the subjunctive tense [sic] not using the word 'let's' as is usually seen, but using this other construction."

References

Drew.ward (talk) 18:29, 18 October 2009 (UTC)

Re: Hebrew Example It seems like the example given for Hebrew really pulls the reader away from the discussion of Cohortatives. The theological debate that is explicated afterwards takes up more room than the linguistic part! Why not choose a cleaner example? Existent80 July 9, 2005 12:00 (UTC)

I'm deleting the section because it's not a discussion of the grammatical mood but a very confused (to put it mildly) argument for interpreting the given form as a cohortative (which it already is--"let us make..." not "we will make" -- this does not change the plural form into a singular). 83.253.94.97 (talk) 06:10, 15 November 2008 (UTC)

Would that there were only an English example! njh 09:13, 9 February 2006 (UTC)

This is interesting, is the form really not used in Modern Hebrew? Isn't it common in Mathematical text? Again, corresponding to the english "let us" in math?

Apparently since the hortatory subjunctive/cohortative mood lacks enough history or interest, I've taken the liberty of adding a very recent example of hortatory subjunctive used in real life, like after grammar was actually invented. (At least for hebrew/arabic.) My original source was my watching C-SPAN, but someone may want to link http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/003427.php which has very targeted and relavent content and video. 75.4.241.138 12:42, 14 June 2007 (UTC)

isn't one of japanese verb endings, -よ, a hortative? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 212.87.13.70 (talk) 17:17, 27 January 2008 (UTC)

You mean like 飲みましょう or 散歩しましょう? I don't know if it's meant to be ょう or just ょ, but since it's clearly an inflection on the finite verb, I guess it must be.　I will think about adding this to the article. Wilsonsamm (talk) 23:33, 23 June 2008 (UTC)