Semantics Of Imperatives Research Articles

Imperatives, Interrogatives and Quantifiers in Korean

In this paper, I discuss restrictions on quantifiers used in interrogatives and imperatives in Korean. Krifka (2001) tried to explain them by assuming that a quantifier quantifies into speech acts and that speech acts are conjoined but not disjoined. I show that speech acts are disjoined under the condition that disjoined speech acts are re-interpreted as a single speech act. In interrogatives, quantifiers cannot have wide scope over a wh-phrase. The restriction is that an interrogative with a quantifier must have the meaning of one question. In imperatives, some quantifiers are not allowed because they generate some conventional implicatures which are not compatible with the semantics of imperatives. Other quantifiers are not allowed in imperativs because they are used to express genericity, which is also not compatible with the semantics of imperatives. To show this, I briefly discuss the semantics of imperatives. (Hongik University)

Who controls who (or what)

Language can be used to bridge the gap between expert knowledge and ability to act. I argue that this function is grammaticalized in imperatives (and in some languages, larger paradigms of directives), and that this becomes evident in restrictions on the (co-)reference of their subjects. I develop an account of the conventional semantics of imperatives and directives in general that associates the prohibited constellations with conflicting discourse requirements.

The Semantics of Imperatives within a Theory of Clause Types

No abstract.

Slovenian Imperatives: You Can’t Always Embed What You Want!

Slovenian has been argued to embed imperatives more freely than other languages do. We argue that the phenomenon is subject to semantic and pragmatic constraints that have been overlooked in the previous literature and that shed light on the semantics of imperatives in general.

The Meaning of Imperatives

AbstractThis article surveys a range of current views on the semantics of imperatives, presenting them as more or less conservative with respect to the Truth‐Conditional Paradigm in semantics. It describes and critiques views at either extreme of this spectrum: accounts on which the meaning of an imperative is a modal truth‐condition, as well as various accounts that attempt to explain imperative meaning without making use of truth‐conditions. It briefly describes and encourages further work on a family of views lying somewhere in the middle. On such views, an imperative will semantically determine, without having as its meaning, a modal truth‐condition, which figures centrally in accounting for various aspects of its meaning.

Logic and Semantics for Imperatives

In this paper I will develop a view about the semantics of imperatives, which I term Modal Noncognitivism, on which imperatives might be said to have truth conditions (dispositionally, anyway), but on which it does not make sense to see them as expressing propositions (hence does not make sense to ascribe to them truth or falsity). This view stands against “Cognitivist” accounts of the semantics of imperatives, on which imperatives are claimed to express propositions, which are then enlisted in explanations of the relevant logico-semantic phenomena. It also stands against the major competitors to Cognitivist accounts—all of which are non-truth-conditional and, as a result, fail to provide satisfying explanations of the fundamental semantic characteristics of imperatives (or so I argue). The view of imperatives I defend here improves on various treatments of imperatives on the market in giving an empirically and theoretically adequate account of their semantics and logic. It yields explanations of a wide range of semantic and logical phenomena about imperatives—explanations that are, I argue, at least as satisfying as the sorts of explanations of semantic and logical phenomena familiar from truth-conditional semantics. But it accomplishes this while defending the notion—which is, I argue, substantially correct—that imperatives could not have propositions, or truth conditions, as their meanings.

Some Logico‐Semantical Themes in Karl Olivecrona's Philosophy of Law: A Non‐Exegetical Approach

Abstract:The paper deals with certain issues with which Olivecrona was mainly concerned in his Philosophy of Law, notably (i) his views about the logical or syntactical form of imperatives as used in the law, and (ii) his views on the semantics of imperatives in the law and on the question whether and to what extent the notions of truth and falsity are applicable to those imperatives at all. In the light of an important critical notice of Olivecrona's work by Marc‐Wogau (1940), we examine some textual evidence for attributing to Olivecrona a so‐called Atheoretical Thesis to the effect that imperatives in the law are neither true nor false or lack truth‐value altogether. We close the paper by commenting on the celebrated distinction due to Hedenius (1941) and further elaborated by Wedberg (1951) between genuine (“rule‐stating”) normative sentences in the law and spurious ones (stating merely that a given rule is (or is not) in force in a given society at a given time). Two interesting difficulties bound up with that distinction will be dealt with. By means of various quotations we try to capture something of the flavour characterizing the legal philosophical discussion in Sweden in the mid‐twentieth century during la belle époque of Scandinavian Legal Realism of which Olivecrona was a typical representative.

The Semantics of Imperatives within a Theory of Clause Types

No abstract.

Force, negation and imperatives

This article presents an account of the cross-linguistic variation in the availability of negative imperatives. By imperatives, I refer to sentences with a distinctive imperative morphology on the main verb and/or a distinctive syntax. In many languages (e.g., Italian, Modern Greek, and Spanish), imperatives cannot be negated. Instead, negative commands are expressed with negative subjunctives and/or infinitivals. However, in German, French, English, Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian, imperatives can be negated. I argue that some languages rule out negative imperatives because the syntax of the language derives a structure which maps onto an incoherent interpretive representation. The analysis I propose builds on the intuition that the directive force contributed by the imperative mood cannot be negated. The negative imperative Don't call! means I require that you not call; it does not mean I do not require that you call. This judgment was already noted by Frege, consequently positing that illocutionary force operators cannot be negated. Pursuing this idea further, I propose that negative imperatives are unavailable in some languages because the syntax derives a structure in which the operator encoding directive force arrives within the c-command domain of negation, where it is interpreted as being negated. As this is incoherent, the structure is ruled impossible. The proposed analysis has implications for the mapping between syntax and semantics of imperatives in particular. In general, it provides evidence that the set of available syntactic structures in a language is restricted by uniform mechanisms for semantic interpretation across languages.