Optative sentences

Optative Sentence: 
 Some grammarians recognize a fifth sentence type, the Optative Sentence. Optative sentences express wishes.
Example:
- May you live a long and happy life together.
- God save you!
- Peace be upon him.
ü Optative sentences formed with May are found mainly in a very formal way.
ü Optative sentences like God save you! uses a special form of the verb in which there is no –s ending.
God save… (not God saves…)
ü Similarly, we have Peace be upon him rather than Peace is upon him.


Examples and Observations:

"'May the best rat win!' bellowed an inebriated Tretiak, and a dozen large rats began racing on a neon-lit mini-track in Tretiak's private club."
      Long may you run.
Long may you run.

Although these changes
Have come
With your chrome heart shining
In the sun,
Long may you run."
(Neil Young, "Long May You Run." Long May You Run, 1976)
  "Adieu, my dearest friend--may you be happy!--and then your Clarissa cannot be wholly miserable."
(Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, 1748)
 "Would that he were gone!"
(Fairy in William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, 1594 or 1596)
 "May God bless and keep you always,
May your wishes all come true,
May you always do for others
And let others do for you.

May you build a ladder to the stars
And climb on every rung.
May you stay, forever young.
"
(Bob Dylan, "Forever Young." Planet Waves, 1974)
Optative May
"Optative clauses express hopes and wishes . . .. This inverted construction with may generally belongs to formal style, though it is also found in various fixed phrases such as May the best man win! or May you be forgiven!"
(Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum, The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002)

"(I.181) a. May he not regret it! . . . "(I.181)
      expresses the optative mood also associated with subjunctive idioms such as God save the king! The former construction is not lexicalized or routinized to the extent of the latter, however. The specialized mood interpretation of may is associated with 'inversion.' . . . Apart from in idioms there is no morphological expression of optative mood in English.
"There is, however, a further optative expletion . . .:
Would that it would/were to rain.
But again this is apparently a dedicated optative form with no corresponding morphological expression. . . . It is the whole expression that expresses optative mood."
(John M. Anderson, The Substance of Language: Morphology, Paradigms, and Periphrases. Oxford Univ. Press, 2011)

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