In Russian, the imperfective is the default aspectual coding for granting approval used by the speaker to give the listener а “green light” to carry out the action as the listener intends. Building on previous studies of aspect and imperatives (e.g., Dickey in Journal of Linguistics 56(3):541–576, 2020), this work employs a cognitive linguistic approach and the Du Bois’ (In Stancetaking in discourse: Subjectivity, evaluation, interaction, vol. 164, pp. 139–182, 2007) stancetaking framework, using the data from the Russian National Corpus and searches on https://dzen.ru/. The study argues that the aspectual coding of imperatives used to grant approval is sensitive to the level of the speaker’s control over the likelihood of the action’s realization, the expression of sequentiality, and the pragmatic-interactional configuration of such usage. Based on this idea, the paper presents a new breakdown of the functions of imperatives used to grant approval, with the imperfective as the default choice. Both aspects are used on a scale ranging from highly encouraging approval to reluctant approval to ironic approval, with the perfective presupposing sequentiality and a certain degree of the speaker’s indirect control over the action in question.
