Benveniste argued that subjectivity is constituted through the linguistic category of person.
Equally crucial, I argue, are the categories of mood and modality, especially the imperative.
As with personal pronouns, the use of these categories presupposes commutability of
perspectives between speaker and addressee. Drawing on language-acquisition research
on four languages, I show that children master the imperative before the personal pronouns,
and that the linguistic categories of person and modality are closely connected within a …