Contents › Section 7: Theory, terminology and disciplinary question › answer 20 of 39
Origin of Language as Commands?
Read this answer on Stack Exchange · See the question
I'm not sure where you got the idea that imperatives are generally the 'root' form. See WALS for the distribution of the morphological imperative: http://wals.info/feature/70A#2/19.3/148.2. The vast majority of the language covered have a morphological imperative expressing person. English is the only language in Europe that does not.
However, the idea that 'non-inflected' forms of verbs are somehow the default is really just an artifact of dictionary making. So you could easily hypothesize that commands were the original impetus in the development of language. You just cannot make a morphological claim about it. In general, any such theories are pure story telling so it is not a very fruitful line inquiry.
© Dominik Lukeš. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. Originally published on Linguistics Stack Exchange, attributed there to Dominik Lukes (profile).