Year: 1999
Type: article
Abstract: this paper is to present a way of interpreting imperatives, where the term imperative refers to sentences that have distinctive imperative morphology on the main verb. Our main proposal is that the directive illocutionary force of imperatives is not the result of Gricean reasoning or inference, but is directly encoded in their logical form, and that Gricean reasoning plays a role in the variability of directive force. We define directive force as a function that takes a certain type of proposition and turns it into a directive action, which we in turn define as an instruction to the hearer to update his or her plan set. A plan set is a set of propositions that specify the hearer's intentions, and it represents the state of affairs that the hearer intends to bring about. We will show that these definitions yield interesting linguistic results. This paper is organized as follows. In x2, we observe that across languages imperatives cannot be embedded and that in clauses embedded under directive verbs many languages use subjunctives or infinitivals. We discuss the implications of this for the proper characterization of the logical form of imperatives. In x3, we propose that the logical form of imperatives contains two components: one component encodes directive force, and the other encodes the irrealis modality contributing the information that the situation described by the imperative is unrealized. We also propose a way of interpreting the two components. In x4, we suggest an extension of our proposal for imperatives to interrogatives. In x5, we discuss how our proposal explains some of the interpretative aspects of imperatives, in particular the interaction of directive force and negation.
Author: Chung–hye Han
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W3114728370