Abstract
Imperative sentences like Dance! do not seem to represent the world. Recent modal analyses challenge this idea, but its intuitive and historical appeal remain strong. This paper presents three new challenges for a non-representational analysis, showing that the obstacles facing it are even steeper than previously appreciated. I will argue that the only way for the non-representationalist to meet these three challenges is to adopt a dynamic semantics . Such a dynamic semantics is proposed here: imperatives introduce preferences between alternatives. This characterization of meaning focuses on what function a sentence serves in discourse, rather than what that sentence refers to (e.g., a state of the world). By representing the meaning of imperatives, connectives and declaratives in a common dynamic format, the challenges posed for non-representationalism are met. EARLY ACCESS
Highlights
It seems like a platitude that imperative sentences like Dance! do not represent the world
Plans are formal constructs that encode the agents’ policies for what to do across a range of possible circumstances.3. This way of thinking about non-representational accounts extends to von Fintel & Iatridou 2017 which holds that imperatives do not semantically encode any directive meaning like Portner 2004, but unlike Portner 2004 that imperatives do not always function in discourse to update the To-Do List
Like other accounts, I will model the logic of imperatives dynamically in terms of how they update an ordering of alternatives
Summary
It seems like a platitude that imperative sentences like Dance! do not represent the world. The key idea to be captured here is that the discourse function of an imperative is not to represent the world. A more sophisticated definition of non-representationalism focuses on discourse function, rather than semantic type: Non-Representational Semantics φ is non-representational just in case the primary discourse function of φ is not to rule out ways the world could be Two exemplars of this approach are Portner 2004 and Charlow 2014. Plans are formal constructs that encode the agents’ policies for what to do across a range of possible circumstances.3 This way of thinking about non-representational accounts extends to von Fintel & Iatridou 2017 which holds that imperatives do not semantically encode any directive meaning like Portner 2004, but unlike Portner 2004 that imperatives do not always function in discourse to update the To-Do List. I will explain there how the semantics of imperatives underdetermines the force of imperative speech acts
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