Sprachtheorie und germanistische Linguistik, 17.2 (2007), 125-145 © Copyright 2007 by Nodus Publikationen (Münster), ISSN 1218-5736 Enikő Tóth The imperative and the subjunctive proper in Hungarian 1 Abstract The paper examines Hungarian complement clauses where two morphologically iden- tical moods in Hungarian, the subjunctive proper and/or the imperative may be used, including comparison of minimal pairs of contexts, where both are grammatical. It presents a case study and its statistical analysis aimed at characterising the gram- matical and semantic role of the moods in question. On the basis of the empirical study it is suggested that independent semantic factors also support the claim that these moods need to be handled separately. 0 Introduction The subjunctive proper and the imperative are morphologically iden- tical in Hungarian, hence, the status of the subjunctive proper pro- vides a controversial issue, most descriptive grammars do not even recognise it as a formally distinct mood. However, adopting the syn- tactic criteria given by Pataki (1984) to differentiate the imperative and the subjunctive proper in complement clauses it can be argued that the subjunctive proper comprises an individual mood. The aim of this paper is to examine those linguistic contexts where the subjunc- tive proper and/or the imperative mood may be used in Hungarian, including comparison of minimal pairs of contexts, where both moods 1 My work on the present paper was supported by the Research Group for Theoreti- cal Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences at the Universities of Deb- recen, Pécs and Szeged. It was also supported by the project OTKA NI 68436.