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What's the difference? Is a volitional sentence simply a weaker form of an imperative sentence?

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I wasn't aware that we had them in English. My wife uses them quite a lot, but that's because she speaks Mandarin.

Given that this is something from Chinese or Japanese, which is being applied to English (either by you or something you have read/heard), please give a precise definition of what you mean.

[Edit: Why on Earth was that down-voted? Does someone believe that English has volitional sentences? It is for the OP to clarify the meaning of the (Asian-language) term, so that people can respond to it in relation to things with similar aspects in English.]

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  • Perhaps we don't have a volitional verb conjugation, but I'd say we still have volitional sentences. That is, we can clearly express the same intent/desire in our sentences despite lacking a specific very form. (BTW, I didn't down-vote)
    – edA-qa mort-ora-y
    Commented Jul 14, 2011 at 7:46
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    Sure, but, because there is no accepted syntactic/semantic definition for English of "volitional sentences", the OP has to tell us what he means by it (it's different in Chinese and Japanese, and is just a simple adjective-noun combination in English, which could mean many things). How can we tell the difference between two things when we don't know for sure what one of them is?
    – Mark Wallace
    Commented Jul 14, 2011 at 9:09
  • I agree. There is no accepted definition of "volitional sentence" in English.
    – edA-qa mort-ora-y
    Commented Jul 14, 2011 at 9:12
  • Perhaps the downvote was because maybe they thought this doesn't answer the question as such, but asks for more info, which could be a comment.
    – Hugo
    Commented Oct 21, 2011 at 8:34

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