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When describing an action preformed by myself, others, or others and myself, I often leave the subject out of the sentence.

A: What did you do yesterday?

B: Climbed a mountain.

What is this called? Is it a mood? Is it still technically the imperative or can that only be second person future ?

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Andrew Raymond Peters
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  • An "imperative" is a *command, order, instruction,* where the implied subject *you* (the addressee) is omitted. So that would be *[You] Climb a mountain!* (you can't make an imperative using *past* tense). – FumbleFingers May 05 '20 at 12:55
  • Then what do I call this? – Andrew Raymond Peters May 05 '20 at 12:57
  • A spoken utterance in a conversational context with an implied subject. [I] Climbed a mountain. – Lambie May 05 '20 at 13:02
  • Terms like "imperative mood" aren't all that useful for describing *English* (they're essentially hangovers from terminology relevant to dead languages such as ancient Latin and Greek, that often simply don't relate well to modern English). Note that "imperative" refers to the verb form itself (which is largely irrelevant to English, since it's just the same as the infinitive) - it's just that we typically use it as an example of a construction where we routinely omit the contextually-implied subject. – FumbleFingers May 05 '20 at 13:05
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    This is not a mood. Nor is it imperative; no orders were given. This is what is called Conversational Deletion, and it happens all the time in normal speech. All those little markers at the beginning of an utterance are predictable if it's a normal utterance, so we just omit them until we get to something new; that's when the talk starts. – John Lawler May 05 '20 at 21:54

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As John Lawler pointed out, this is a case of conversational deletion, where the predictable (and obvious in context) pronoun "I" has been deleted from the start of B's utterance.

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