The Semantics of Imperatives within a Theory of Clause Types
By Paul Portner. 2004
342 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The contrast between imperatives and promissives brings out the issue well. These two types are functionally very similar: An imperative places a requirement on the addressee, while a promissive places a requirement on the speaker. Yet imperatives are apparently universal (and at least extremely common), while promissives are extremely rare. It does not seem easy to give a functional explanation for this contrast, and so in is reasonable to inquire into whether an explanation in terms of syntactic or semantic theory is possible. Clauses may of course be categorized in a wide variety of ways, and so it is a necessary precondition to the study of clause type systems to have a definition which makes clear which types of types we have in mind. Sadock & Zwicky ( 1 985) provide a suitable definition. According to them, clause types are universal, form a closed system, and are associated with a specific force. We should understand the property of universality in terms of ( 1 ) above; the major types are universal , whereas the others have noteworthy typological properties. Saying that clause types form a closed system is to say that every sentence is a member of one and only one type. This implies , for example, that the indicative mood is not a clause type in the relevant sense, since root declaratives and interrogatives are typically both declarative/interrogative and indicative. The concept of force most frequently invoked, especially in the syntax literature, is that of illocutionary force, but this is not accurate. Illocutionary force is a communicative-intentional concept, so that (2), used in its stereotypical way, has the force of requesting, not asking.
Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Language and Linguistics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8b0d184213cf97c54f3f8c388735fea131fae216
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Artificial Intelligence
In Language and Linguistics
Citations in the corpus
- Two Puzzles About Deontic Necessity (2005, background): “Stalnaker (2002) gives the following example of how a proposition can be added to the common ground as the result 25See Portner (2004).”
- Encoding the addressee in the syntax: evidence from English imperative subjects (2008, background): “In what follows I will not discuss the lambda-abstraction over the subject, for which I refer the reader to Portner (2004) and Pak et al. (2007a).”
- Mood and gradability: an investigation of the subjunctive mood in Spanish (2008, methodology): “5.3 Directive predicates Portner (2004, 2007) proposes that imperative sentences are used to contribute to the discourse component that he labels the To-do List, more precisely the addressee!s To-do List.”