Skip to content
Licensed Unlicensed Requires Authentication Published by De Gruyter Mouton 2019

6. Imperatives

From the book Semantics - Sentence and Information Structure

  • Chung-hye Han

Abstract

This paper investigates the meaning of imperatives, sentences that have distinctive imperative morphology on the verb and/or distinctive imperative syntax, and are canonically used to express the illocutionary force of directives such as commands and requests. I start the paper with a brief survey of some essential characteristics of imperatives that should be accounted for by any analysis of the meaning of imperatives. I then present a summary of proposals in the literature on the sentential force and modality expressed by imperatives, and how they account for the characteristics of imperatives. I will mainly discuss works of Han (1999, 2000) and Portner (2005, 2007), making reference to other works as necessary (Bolinger 1977, Huntley 1984, Davies 1986, Wilson & Sperber 1988, Potts 2003, Roberts 2004, Mastop 2005, Schwager 2006), as Han and Portner contain extensive discussions on force and modality of imperatives from two contrasting perspectives. Han takes the position that force and modality are formally encoded in the logical form of imperatives, while Portner takes the position that these are not formally represented and are instead derived indirectly on the basis of the semantic object that the imperative denotes. Despite the contrasting positions, they both reach a similar conclusion: the force of the imperative is to add the content of the imperative to a particular discourse component (Plan Set for Han and To-Do List for Portner), and the modality of the imperative is to restrict or update the ordering source associated with deontic modality. The paper ends with a discussion on the syntactic nature of the covert subject in the English imperative, and how it gets to have 2nd person reference (Schmerling 1975, Beukema & Coopmans 1989, Potsdam 1998, Platzack & Rosegren 1997, Han 2000, Rupp 2003, Portner 2005, Pak, Portner & Zanuttini 2007, Zanuttini 2008).

© 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Munich/Boston
Downloaded on 29.3.2024 from https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110589863-006/html
Scroll to top button