Formal Approaches to the Syntax and Semantics of Imperatives.

Abstract

This dissertation examines imperatives, defined as a morphological class, offering a set of interrelated, formal hypotheses regarding their syntactic and semantic analysis. Three major questions guide this research. First, the distribution of imperatives is addressed with respect to the possibility of occurrence in syntactically embedded clauses, a context often believed to exclude imperatives across languages.

It is shown that morphological imperatives productively occur in embedded clauses in languages with rich (person) imperative morphology. The independently motivated theory of Feature Transfer (Chomsky 2008) explains the cross-linguistic variation, in that imperatives with rich morphology are treated as finite verbs, while imperatives in e.g. English are selected by an operator with interpretable 2nd person features, following aspects of the analysis for English-type imperatives in Zanuttini (2008) and Han (2000).

The semantic properties of morphological imperatives constitutes a second research area. Embedded (non-performative) imperatives as well as non-command imperatives in English motivate an analysis in which imperatives have the semantic value of a weak necessity modal. The operator which obligatorily selects imperatives in English-type languages and optionally selects imperatives in rich-morphology languages has as its semantic value a set of presuppositions (following Kaufmann 2012) which encode performativity. Imperatives in English therefore have two semantic components, a modal component (represented clause-internally) and a performative component (represented in the left-periphery).

Finally, I address suppletive imperatives and the hypothesis (Portner 2004) that these belong to a clause type which includes morphological imperatives. While I reject the clause-type hypothesis for imperatives, I argue that performative imperatives and suppletive imperatives share one aspect of meaning, namely the performative component. Suppletive imperatives and true imperatives can differ in terms of modal component, deriving the differences between suppletives and imperatives in terms of the fine-grained interpretive possibilities discussed by von Fintel & Iatridou (2010).

These hypotheses lead to the conclusion that imperatives do not have proto-typical semantic functions such as Ordering (Kaufmann 2012) or Requiring (Portner 2004). Instead, imperatives encode weak necessity modality and can (in some languages must) occur in performative contexts, with a syntactic distribution which is wider than previously thought.