In recent work the imperative seems to have attracted much less attention than the interrogative, perhaps because it appears to be a rather simple structure. This has meant that quite general analyses sometimes find it necessary to relegate the imperative to a footnote or exclude it from the discussion altogether, and that even when linguists have addressed themselves specifically to an account of imperatives, they have sometimes concluded that the imperative is simply an inherently idiosyncratic construction where we should not expect to find the tidy regularities we look for elsewhere. However, this study demonstrates that there are many interesting regularities to be accounted for, and that useful generalisations can be made which relate the imperative to other constructions. Throughout the work the emphasis is on detailed description of present-day usage, with the aim of identifying patterns which have previously been ignored and seeking explanations for those which have previously been dismissed as arbitrary.