Detail #391: A Small Idea on Imperatives and Similar Moods

Thinking about the Dairwueh 'preprepositional' slot, that in some prepositions in that language can be used for certain things, I came up with an idea that I almost decided to incorporate in Dairwueh, but then realized it does have enough split ergativity already thank you very much. 

Ok, so. Consider a situation wherein a type of imperative - not perhaps the one you'd use when rude or in a hurry, so not the "get out of of the way of that speeding dogsled!"-kind of imperative, but rather a more relaxed or formal imperative.

This could basically reuse some preposition, which would mark the subject and object (thus opening for optatives and subjunctives and the like!) 

However, prepositions kind of prefer being prepositions. So, in the case of there being no object, the subject becomes the object of the preposition.

Here is the intransitive construction, rendered with 'for' as the imperative marker:

Sleep, for you! ('Sleep!')

Run, for him! ('Would that he run!')

Now, the transitive case is where it gets interesting:

Compose you.nom for a song! ('Write a song!')

Learn he for a job ('Would that he learned a job!')

Now, variants of the language could of course deal differently with it, placing, for instance, the intransitive subject to the left anyway, or adding a dummy pronoun to the object side, or even making this an OPS thing (Object, preposition, subject), or a PSO thing (preposition, subject, object).

This could of course generalize in other ways, and other prepositions might start taking two arguments. In fact, just generally, I am sort of fascinated with the idea of adpositions with multiple arguments recently.