Imperatives and commands in Quechua

The Quechuan languages of the Central Andes have a dedicated Imperative Mood paradigm featuring personal reference marking for all subject endings except first person. Non-canonical third person subject forms are part of this paradigm. Although there is a formal overlap between Future Tense and Imperative in marking of the first person inclusive subject, the former can be used in questions or be accompanied by validation markers, whereas the latter cannot. In imperative constructions negation is indicated in the same way as in other moods, except that it requires the presence of the prohibitive adverb ama, instead of plain negative mana. Conversely, ama can also be used in non-Imperative environments to express a mild or indirect command. It can be argued that Quechuan languages have two competing ways of indicating prohibition: Imperative structures with regular negation marking and obligatory presence of ama, and non-Imperative structures where ama introduces a prohibitive connotation.