In the present paper the results from previous research on aspect in the
imperative, done first for Russian and subsequently for the remaining
Slavonic languages, are applied to another, non Slavonic language that also
expresses the category of verbal aspect with morphological means, ie. modern
Greek. It is confirmed that in imperative forms the verbal aspect may have
pragmatical implications as regards preserving or cancelling distance and,
more generally speaking, as regards (im-) politeness. That is, in Greek,
similar to what was observed in some Slavonic languages (i.e. Serbian and
Czech, but not in Russian) requests for actions that are expressed with the
perfective aspect (ie. with aorist stem) are more neutral, ?correct?, formal,
while those expressed with the imperfective (ie. with the present stem) are
more informal, direct and therefore potentially impolite. The latter can be
used at most in informal contexts in which the imperative, directed at a
person, is expressed by means of the allocutive pronoun of the second person
singular.