Fine-tuning natural language imperatives

摘要

This paper considers imperatives as sentential form types of natural languages that are canonically used for orders or commands. Linguistic theory aims to account for this connection by assigning conventional meanings that interact accordingly with a suitable representation of the utterance context. I revisit the main challenges for a semantic analysis of imperatives and compare a few recent accounts. I propose that imperatives contain modal operators and express propositions; they trigger presuppositions that constrain and guide their interaction with the contextual settings. I evaluate the effects predicted for a couple of different constellations and argue that our intuitions about the speech acts occurring in these settings are modeled successfully.