Imperatives

Abstract

Imperative sentences usually occur in speech acts such as orders, requests, and pleas. However, they are also used to give advice, and to grant permission, and are sometimes found in advertisements, good wishes and conditional constructions. Yet, the relationship between the form of imperatives, and the wide range of speech acts in which they occur, remains unclear, as do the ways in which semantic theory should handle imperatives. This book is the first to look systematically at both the data and the theory. The first part discusses data from a large set of languages, including many outside the Indo-European family, and analyses in detail the range of uses to which imperatives are put, paying particular attention to controversial cases. This provides the empirical background for the second part, where the authors offer an accessible, comprehensive and in-depth discussion of the major theoretical accounts of imperative semantics and pragmatics.

Indirect request processing, sentence types and illocutionary forces

“…For instance, authors like Han (2000), , or Isac (2015) all posit that the interpretation of the imperative sentence (1) as a request, viz. its directive illocutionary force, is determined by the meaning of the imperative mood (for a detailed overview, see Jary & Kissine, 2014).…”

Children with Autism Understand Indirect Speech Acts: Evidence from a Semi-Structured Act-Out Task

“…While sentences in the imperative mood, such as (6), are prototypically used for performing requests [ 34 ], the linguistic structure of the interrogative in (3), of the declarative in (4) or of the noun phrase in (5) does not suffice to understand that they are meant as a request. Consequently, some kind of contextual processing is required to comprehend (and then to comply with) the request.…”

Contexts as Shared Commitments

“…Several authors have advanced semantic accounts of directives on which these are semantically distinctive objects, distinct from assertions (what declarative sentences signify by default), just as questions (what interrogative sentences signify by default) are; Han ( 2011 ), Portner ( forthcoming ), and Jary and Kissine ( 2014 ) provide good overviews. Along the lines of Stalnaker ( 1978 ), researchers such as Han, Portner and Jary and Kissine suggest that strong directives also have a content to be added (when successful) to a collection of propositions.…”