Parallelism between Imperative Clauses and Interrogative Clauses in English

Abstract

Inverted English imperative clauses such as Don’t you talk to everyone! share the same word order and scope interactions with interrogative clauses. This suggests that there seems to be parallelism between interrogative clauses and imperative clauses. With much emphasis focused on similarities between imperative clauses and interrogative clauses, this paper proposes that English imperative clauses undergo T-to-C movement as do English interrogative clauses. More specifically, when T and C in imperative clauses show the same matched feature with [IMP], they undergo T-to-C movement, which results in inverted imperative clauses (formal imperative clauses). On the other hand, if T and C in imperative clauses do not share the feature, there is no T-to-C movement, which yields non-inverted imperative clauses (‘economical’ imperative clauses). In other words, imperative clauses have two different types of syntactic structures whether they undergo T-to-C movement or not. We argue that two distinct structures of imperative clauses follow from the fact that T in imperatives has the mood feature [IMP] aside from C.