The article focuses on imperfective imperatives at the early stages of Russian child and child-directed speech. Its goal is to explore the factors determining the choice of aspect in the imperative. Results showed that the distribution of perfective and imperfective verb tokens in parental speech does not directly influence the percentage of perfectives and imperfectives in child language. Children acquire imperfective imperatives following some semantic patterns: the verbs of motion and body positioning occur first, followed by the verbs of manipulative activity and those aimed at drawing attention to an object. The results indicate the role of actionality in the acquisition of modal and aspectual meanings and corroborate the fact that some verb classes show different patterns of aspectual behavior.