Abstract
This paper concerns the formal semantic analysis of imperative sentences. It is argued that such an analysis cannot be deferred to the semantics of propositions, under any of the three commonly adopted strategies: the performative analysis, the sentence radical approach to propositions, and the (nondeclarative) mood-as-operator approach. Whereas the first two are conceptually problematic, the third faces empirical problems: various complex imperatives should be analysed in terms of semantic operators over simple imperatives. One particularly striking case is the Dutch pluperfect imperative. It is argued that this construction should be analysed as a genuine counterfactual imperative. On the constructive side, in the last part of the paper a formal semantic analysis of imperatives is presented, in the framework of Update Semantics. On this analysis, imperatives are sui generis semantic entities, on a par with propositions. The analysis also includes an account of the counterfactual imperatives.
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Acknowledgments
This paper has been a long time in the making. For many valuable comments many thanks are due to Frank Veltman, Martin Stokhof, Paul Dekker, Fabrice Nauze, Darrin Hindsill, Henk Wolf, Hans Bennis, Nicholas Asher, Maria Aloni, Magdalena Schwager, Ede Zimmermann, Herman Philipse, Albert Visser, and the reviewers of Linguistics and Philosophy.
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Open Access This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0), which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
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Mastop, R. Imperatives as semantic primitives. Linguist and Philos 34, 305–340 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-011-9101-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-011-9101-x