Quote:
Originally Posted by BeccaPrice
actually, I want long, involved sentences - things like "I restore you to health" and "you have been healed" - or some approximation of those.
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Okay, in which case, you definitely want to use the pronouns and particles and extras (and technically, the examples of what you want are declarative indicative statements, not imperatives; sorry, amateur linguistics geek
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The general patterns for an imperative sentence which expresses a command (approximate Cantonese examples, since I've got the reference textbooks* for it lying around and I'm marginally better at it than Mandarin and while there are differences, the grammars are close enough and I'm assuming you'll be using made-up magical word equivalents) go thusly:
(NB: I've hyphenated words that go together as one conceptual unit)
1. The general imperative order (e.g. equivalent to "heal! or you become well!"):
2ndPRONOUN + VERB-PHRASE + IMPERATIVE END-PARTICLE
Leih hou-faan la (you improve wellbeing [hou-faan, if I'm parsing it correctly is actually "good + VERBAL PARTICLE indicating situation change that is a return"])
You can make it fancier by adding in some adverbial expressions:
2sg + ADVERB + V-P + I-END-P
Leih faai-di hou-faan la (you faster improve wellbeing)
And even fancier by adding in a reinforcing coverb and use a longer phrase for getting well:
2sg + ADVERB + COVERB 1sg + V-P + I-END-P
Leih faai-di tuhng ngoh fui-fuhk gihn-hong la (you faster on my orders ["for me"] recover health eh!)
2. A 1st-person-oriented imperative (i.e. "let me heal you!") goes thusly and can be modified in the same ways as above (minus the variant with the coverb, IIRC, because it would be a form of redundant reduplication which would make no sense):
SUGGESTION-PARTICLE + 1sg + V-P + 2sg + I-END-P
Dang ngoh gan-jih leih la ("gan jih" means to heal by fixing the root cause of the illness)
3. A 3rd-person imperative (i.e. "let him get well soon!") goes thusly (I think you can use the coverb modification with this):
SUGGESTION-P + 3sg + V-P + I-END-P
Dang keuih hou-faan la
Incidentally, the standard set expression for "(Wish you) get well soon" in Cantonese is "Jūk léih jóu yaht hōngfuhk".
You may also want to have a look at Omniglot's "Get Well Soon!"
multilingual phrase listing.
* The ones from Routledge by Virginia Yip & Stephen Matthews, which are excellent and recommended, by the way.