Imperatives

6 Key excerpts on "Imperatives"

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  Imperatives

  • Mark Jary, Mikhail Kissine(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  PART II The theories INTRODUCTION TO PART II: FROM DATA TO THEORY In Part I, we have been concerned with defining Imperatives and highlighting the semantic characteristics that they display. We have seen that Imperatives can be defined in terms of their prototypical pragmatic function: that of performing directive speech acts, them- selves best understood as utterances whose function is to provide the hearer with reason to act. We have noted that such a definition of the imperative mood has the attraction of being neither overly restrictive – it does not rule out the possibility that Imperatives have non-directive uses – nor overly inclusive – it does rule in forms that are used to perform directives if this is not their prototypical function. We also argued that the imperative mood should be thought of as a sentential category that can be realised either morphologically, syntactically, or by a combination of both. On this conception of imperative mood, the absence of imperative verbal inflection is not sufficient reason to deny that a language has an imperative. It may be that, as appears to be the case with English, the imperative is realised by syntactic means alone. That said, however, it is important to distinguish the imperative from particles associated with directive force, such as please in English. Such forms can typically coerce a directive reading of a range of sentence types, regardless of their prototypical function. Furthermore, they are often restricted in regard to the type of directive in whose performance they can be employed. For example, please can be used in a request, but not in a command. The fact that the imperative is defined in terms of its relationship with directive force makes attractive the view that its meaning just is directive force. This hypothesis would be even more attractive if the imperative had only directive interpretations. It was therefore import- ant in Part I to consider whether the imperative has non-directive uses.

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  Semantics - Sentence and Information Structure

  • Paul Portner, Claudia Maienborn, Klaus von Heusinger, Paul Portner, Claudia Maienborn, Klaus von Heusinger(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  She observes that if the imperative is a pragmatic category, the fact that so many languages have special morphosyn-tactic forms for the canonical expression of directives remains unexplained. For Han, Imperatives are propositions and a little more. Han argues that the syntax of Imperatives contains “[imp]” feature in the C domain, which maps onto a force-indicating operator, labelled as directive , in the logical form of Imperatives, represented in (2). So, for Han, the fact that imper-atives have an illocutionary force is not the result of pragmatic inference, but of direct encoding in their logical forms. And pragmatic reasoning and inference contribute in determining the exact content of the illocutionary force expressed by the imperative. This accounts for the fact that although Imperatives canon-ically express directive force, they can also express non-directive forces such as permissions, wishes, dares and threats depending on the discourse context. Han’s proposal is inspired by Frege (1960) and Lewis (1976), who advance that the meaning component of sentences is divided into the force component, whose interpretation is subject to rules of discourse, and the propositional component, whose interpretation is subject to truth-conditional semantics. Han takes a force-indicating operator to be responsible for allowing a speaker to use a sentence to perform a speech act (Austin 1962, Searle 1969, 1976). She calls this operator in Imperatives directive because the canonical force of Imperatives is directive force. She argues that directive is a function that takes a proposition ( p ) and returns a Directive Action. She proposes that by performing a directive action, the speaker instructs the addressee to update a particular discourse module which she calls the Plan Set. An addressee’s Plan Set is a set of propositions that specifies 6 Imperatives 235 the addressee’s intentions which represent the state of affairs s/he intends to bring about.

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  The Syntax of Imperatives

  • Asier Alcázar, Mario Saltarelli(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  14 2 Imperatives across languages 2.0 Chapter overview Until recent years, cross-linguistic examination of imperative clauses was lim- ited to relatively modest data samples (Sadock and Zwicky 1985: 23 languages (extended sample: 32), Zhang 1990: 46 languages). 1 Later typological sur- veys have tapped into larger pools of data. In a survey of 495 languages, van der Auwera and Lejeune (2005a) investigate whether Imperatives have dedi- cated forms (morphologically distinct from D&I). In a similar sample, van der Auwera and Lejeune (2005b) and van der Auwera (2010) study the negation of imperative clauses. On their part, van der Auwera et al. (2004) examine mark- edness relations in imperative-hortative paradigms in 376 languages. 2 Beyond particular research questions, two volumes have broadly surveyed Imperatives and hortatives: the St. Petersburg survey (Xrakovskij 2001), an edited collec- tion, and Aikhenvald (2010), arguably the most comprehensive typological work to date. Taken together, these volumes and articles provide new reference points for a more exhaustive study of imperative syntax, morphology and semantics. Some of the earlier observations have been confirmed. For instance, that imperative subjects are optional. But a reassessment of some currently held assumptions is necessary. According to Xrakovskij (2001), Imperatives are the most mor- phologically complex form in some languages. Aikhenvald (2010) finds that Imperatives seem to have as many grammatical categories as D&I. Recall that Imperatives have been assumed to be defective (1.1.1) on account of imperative verbs being bare roots or minimally inflected. Other important revisions in this chapter include the study of hortatives, the ban on true negative Imperatives, and whether Imperatives can lead to indirect speech act interpretations.

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  The Cambridge Handbook of Formal Semantics

  • Maria Aloni, Paul Dekker(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Imperative sentence mood refers to the grammatical form or forms which distinguish imperative sentences as a clause type, thereby distinguishing them from declaratives and interrogatives. Examples like (18) and (19b) exemplify imperative sentence mood but not imperative verbal mood. To put it simply, imperative verbal mood is opposed to indicative and subjunctive (perhaps among others), while imperative sentence mood is opposed to declarative and interrogative (perhaps among others). (See Han, 1998; Zanuttini and Portner, 2003, for discussion.) Imperatives 605 Example (19b) is just as much an imperative by semantic/pragmatic criteria as a sentence with the imperative verbal mood. Therefore, if an abstract fea- ture or operator is to explain the distinct syntactic behavior seen in (17), this feature cannot be the sole expression of directive illocutionary force. The syntactic diversity of imperative sentences within languages like Greek and Italian shows that there is no simple correlation between gram- matical form and the imperative speech act type. This fact poses a prob- lem for speech act theory’s approach to the conventionalization question. As pointed out by Zanuttini and Portner (2003), it seems that it is not pos- sible to identify any discrete piece of the morphosyntactic representation with the force marker. If force marker approach to the conventionaliza- tion question is to have a chance of working at all, it will have to take a more abstract view of grammatical structure, one according to which dif- ferent aspects of form can serve as force marker in different circumstances. In other words, it would need to propose something like the following: in Italian, force can be expressed either by imperative verbal mood or by a combination of root position, infinitival verb form, and negation.

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  Speech Acts in English

  From Research to Instruction and Textbook Development

  • Lorena Pérez-Hernández(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  If IMPERATIVE base constructions were actually as impolite as traditional pragmatists deem them to be, we may wonder why so many native speakers chose this linguistic strategy for the performance of an intrinsically non-impositive speech act like suggesting. As was explained in detail in Chapter 2, however, it is possible to adopt a weaker version of the literal force hypothesis, according to which imperative sentences are defined simply as those which present the content of a proposition for realisation (Risselada, 1993: 71). Under the light of a weaker literal force hypothesis, Imperatives are not impositive per se. In previous sections, it has also been shown how the combined use of the IMPERATIVE base construction with specific realisation procedures for the semantic variables of different directive categories leads to a metonymic activation of specific speech acts. IMPERATIVE base constructions are combined with impositive linguistic strategies (e.g. expressions of immediateness, forceful intonation, etc.) to activate orders; with strategies of mitigation and politeness (e.g. adverb please, expressions of optionality, mitigation, and social closeness) to yield requests; and with a combination of strategies of persuasion and insistence (e.g. repetitions, adverb please, negotiation, and reasoning) to prompt a begging interpretation. The use of the imperative for the expression of suggestions also displays some peculiarities of its own as captured in Table 4.15. As the data in our corpus reveal, what characterises IMPERATIVE base constructions in relation to the act of suggesting is their use in isolation.

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  Discourse Pragmatics and the Verb

  The Evidence from Romance

  • Suzanne Fleischman, LINDA WAUGH, Linda R. Waugh(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  6 The status of Imperatives as discourse signals 1

  Béatrice Lamiroy and Pierre Swiggers

  1. Introduction

  1.1. Theoretical introduction

  The last decades have witnessed a strong interest in theories of énonciaiion, and, at a deeper level, a move away from a grammar-focused approach toward a communication-centered one.2 In two recent books, Hagège (1982, 1985) has integrated the latter type of approach into a general theory of language, relating it to an "enunciativehierarchical point of view." This contrasts with a morphosyntactic point of view, which focuses on formal (including positional) and functional aspects of linguistic units above the phoneme-level. By "function" we understand here "internal function," thus a reference to the relation of linguistic units to the language system. In such a view "function" can be opposed to "use." (One could also speak of function 1 and function 2, the latter referring then to the relation between language units and language users.3 )

  The grammatical tradition has largely eschewed usage-based definitions of linguistic units on the morphosyntactic level. While this may be due to an awareness (never explicitly acknowledged) that form and function (i.e. function 1) allow one to define linguistic units in a much more operational way, one might well wonder whether this situation is not due to a "subordinate" attitude on the part of grammarians, who often prefer (or preferred) to walk in the footsteps of logicians and language pedagogues who have insisted on formal and content-based classificatory criteria. This is not the proper place to embark upon a broad-gauged investigation of a striking inertia in the history of linguistics. However several observations are relevant in this context:

  • (a) the remarkable longevity of the parts-of-speech approach (cf. Swiggers and Van Hoecke 1986), which is still adopted, without question, in various modern theories of grammar;

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