Abstract
This paper investigates the interpretive restrictions on the subjects of imperative, promissive, and exhortative sentences—what we call the “jussive” clause types. It argues that the data cannot be explained by a theory that appeals only to semantic and pragmatic factors, and that an account crucially involving syntax is required. We propose that jussive clauses contain a functional head that bears a person feature. This head is an operator that, when in a sufficiently local configuration, binds the subject and enters an agreement relation with it. The restrictions in person features exhibited by the subjects are a consequence of this agreement relation. Moreover, we show that the syntactic structures produced by our analysis are compatible with a compositional semantics that yields the correct interpretation for imperatives and other jussives.
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Notes
Han (1998: 136–7) treats the argument that controls the PRO subject of an imperative as an implicit argument of a higher imperative operator; it is not clear whether this implicit argument is syntactically present or not. If it is, presumably it is pro, and we’d still have to know how this pro is licensed and how it gets its 2nd person interpretation. If it is not syntactically present, it is difficult to see how to fit it into any of the ideas of how control works that are present in the literature (i.e., that it is an instance of binding, movement or Agree).
Beukema and Coopmans discuss the syntactic analysis of quantificational subjects, but not their interpretation. They assume that it is possible to treat other lexical subjects, like those in (1c), as quantifiers.
As far as we know, there are no theories of this discussed in the syntactic literature, other than the performative hypothesis, but the performative hypothesis explains the meaning of the subject as the result of a syntactic process, not as a result of pragmatic reasoning.
We are grateful to Shaligram Shukla for providing the Bhojpuri data present in this paper.
One may also see Han (1998) as suggesting that the interpretation of the subjects of suppletive imperatives (that is, those in subjunctive or infinitive form) is determined pragmatically; however, she is not explicit on this point.
We observe that a similar pattern holds in English sentences with promise. In such sentences, the matrix subject, referring to the “promiser”, has a special connection to the subject of the embedded clause:
- (i):
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Sarah promised PRO to kiss John.
- (ii):
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Sarah promised that she would kiss John.
- (iii):
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??Sarah promised that John would be kissed by her.
- (iv):
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#Sarah promised that John would kiss her.
While it is not surprising that the subject of promise binds the subject of the infinitival clause in (i), because it is a control verb, there is also a difference between (ii) and (iii), with a finite embedded clause. The meaning of (ii), where the matrix subject binds the embedded subject, is the same as (i): it reports a garden variety promise. Example (iii), in which the embedded clause has been passivized, is quite odd, probably for independent reasons. Crucially, while (iv) is grammatical, it has a slightly different meaning: it implies that Sarah can affect John’s behavior so that he will kiss her. The relation between matrix and embedded subject in (iii) is very similar to what Potsdam (1998) calls the control relationship in his analysis of imperatives.
The pattern in (i)–(iv) is distinctive to verbs which report jussive speech acts (e.g., promise, swear and require of). In contrast, non-jussive verbs such as hope show no such relationship between the matrix subject and the subject of a finite complement:
- (v):
-
Sarah hoped PRO to kiss John.
- (vi):
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Sarah hoped that she would kiss John.
- (vii):
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??Sarah hoped that John would be kissed by her.
- (viii):
-
Sarah hoped that John would kiss her.
It seems that promise has some of the syntactic properties of the jussive head, in that it imposes restrictions on the embedded subject, even when the embedded clause is finite. Though we are merely speculating here, it is possible that the jussive head is syntactically similar to a lexical jussive verb; in this sense, our proposal could be seen as a modern version of the performative hypothesis.
We take this element to be the subject. Kratzer (2009) argues that, in cases where we traditionally say that the subject binds an anaphor, it is actually a functional head, namely v, that does so: v and the external argument share their ϕ-features via Predication (cf. (19) in Kratzer 2009); since v binds the reflexive, they also share all their ϕ-features via Feature Transmission under Binding. While Kratzer’s approach fits well with our views, here we will continue to describe the phenomenon in the more familiar terms.
Chris Collins, Marcel den Dikken, Eric Potsdam and an anonymous reviewer have pointed out to us that a second person bound element in co-occurrence with a quantificational subject is not completely ruled out in declaratives and interrogatives. For example, the following are two naturally occurring examples provided to us by Chris Collins:
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(i)
(Context: Marchers protest for federal immigration reform) Has everyone here forgotten your own history??? www.chicagobreakingnews.com/.../demonstrators-march-for-federal-immigration-reform.html
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(ii)
(Context: message posted on myspace) Has everyone on here (My Space) received your class of 1997 reunion invitation? www.myspace.com/1997richmond
We agree that such examples are acceptable. But we think that there is a crucial difference: in declaratives and interrogatives, examples of this type require a special context, whereas in imperatives they do not. This difference must be explained.
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(i)
One might think that English exhortatives like Let’s go! are like imperatives with first person plural (inclusive) features. While this may be correct, showing that it is would require a detailed analysis of the syntax of this clause type. Note that Let us … is not equivalent to Let’s …, as it makes sense for a group of prisoners to say to their guard Let us go!, but not Let’s go! Let us … clearly has a use as an imperative, with a second person subject, and thus Let’s … is not simply its phonetically reduced form.
Of course the asterisks in (15) only apply to the bound reading of the possessive pronoun. As a reviewer notes, in Korean the use of pronouns is restricted, and the most natural way to express the sentences in (15–16) is by repeating the proper nouns:
However, our survey of 30 native speakers of Korean shows that possessive pronouns are also acceptable in jussives.
Once again, the asterisks only apply to the bound readings of the pronouns. If the subject marker is replaced with a topic marker, the examples in (16) are more acceptable. (Making the sentence a tag question also seems to help.) These subjects have a contrastive interpretation, as in (i):
In such cases, there might be a null 1st or 2nd person subject that binds the pronoun. Alternatively, it could be that first person features can be assigned to nominals in topic position. In either case, the 1st and 2nd person features are not a lexical property of “mommy” or “Inho”. According to Lee (2003), the subjects emma and Inho in (i) above are contrastive topics; however, for simplicity throughout the paper we will gloss them as topics (without distinguishing between topics and contrastive topics).
We note that the most natural way of expressing this meaning is by repeating “mommy”/“Inho” in the possessive:
In Chomsky (1995), cancel is a technical term that allows him to distinguish a cancelled derivation from a non-convergent one.
Zhang’s (1990) cross-linguistic investigation points out that imperative subjects bear nominative case.
Alternatively, if we were to follow Chomsky in assuming that the subject enters the derivation with a valued person feature, we would have to assume that the only syntactic derivations that yield a grammatical result are those in which the value for person of the T-Jussive head and of the subject match.
This reasoning applies to locally bound pronouns. We follow Kratzer (2009) in assuming that pronouns that are not bound enter the derivation with person features; in such cases, the person feature is interpretable on the pronoun.
Due to space limitations, we cannot discuss what “licensing a null subject” means in modern terms, i.e. how Rizzi’s (1982, 1986) licensing mechanism should be expressed today. (For a new take on Rizzi’s ideas, see Neeleman and Szendröi (2007) or Holmberg (2005).) Hence we limit ourselves to pointing out the existence of a correlation between the presence of an interpretable person feature on the probe and the presence of a null subject as the goal.
Ananda Lima pointed out to us that, in her variety of Portuguese (from Brasilia), proper names obligatorily take a determiner, as shown in (i). However, when they occur in imperatives, the overt determiner is impossible (ii):
Following our line of reasoning, she suggests that this is because the determiner a is 3rd person, and thus incompatible with the 2nd person value of the T-Jussive head. In contrast, the null determiner lacks a value for person, and thus can acquire the 2nd person value of the T-Jussive head. (The reflexive se and the possessive pronoun seu are the same in 2nd and 3rd person.)
Examples (24a) and (24b) are from http://veteransforpeaceactions.blogspot.com/2007_05_01_archive.html, and http://www.postalnewsblog.com/2010/08/18/mailers-say-oversized-overpaid-workforce-is-biggest-contributor-to-usps-financial-woes/, respectively.
A search of everyone of you followed immediately by a form of have yields about 468,000 hits for has and about 5,880,000 for have. But this result is less relevant, because have is also the non-finite form, so the have count is likely to include things like That made every one of you have a problem.
One might be tempted to assimilate these cases to the cases of ‘agreement attraction’ (e.g., The label on the bottles are …) mentioned in descriptive grammars (from Jespersen 1961 to Quirk et al. 1985) and widely discussed in the literature on sentence processing (cf. Bock and Miller 1991; Vigliocco et al. 1996 and Badecker and Kuminiak 2007, among others). Though we are not in a position to definitively show that they are not cases of agreement attraction, we doubt that they are, due to the fact that speakers do not find them ungrammatical in the same way, and that agreement attraction is usually said not to apply to pronouns (cf. den Dikken 2001). We leave the investigation of this possibility for further research.
For some speakers of English (though not all), not only quantifiers, but even lexical subjects can co-occur with either second or third person anaphors in imperatives, as argued in Potsdam (1998). That is, some speakers accept both “Mary wash yourself, John take the dog for a walk!” and “Mary wash herself and John take the dog for a walk!” Because of this inter-speaker variability, we see this case as different from that of imperatives with quantificational subjects. We refer the reader to Zanuttini (2008) for a discussion of variation in this domain.
We represent the Jussive Phrase as a head initial phrase for simplicity. We do not need to enter the debate of whether Korean is structurally head initial or head final, as it is tangential to our proposal concerning the properties of the head of the Jussive Phrase, which would remain the same even if the head followed its complement.
There are several possibilities as to how to represent the meaning of inclusive we in terms of person features. We opt to treat it as a complex combination of first and second person, but one might also think of it as a distinct fourth person (Benincà and Poletto 2005) or as an instance of two distinct feature specifications ([person:1], [person:2]). Kratzer (2009) employs a 1st+2nd feature similar to Benincà and Poletto’s fourth person, but also discusses the possibility of sum features.
Phonologically, -ha-e becomes -hay.
In the examples in (29), from Zanuttini (2008), a vocative is used to make it clear that the subject does not refer to the addressee; but, in the proper context, the sentences would be fine even without the vocative, and the interpretation would still involve an addressee: the addressee is asked to see to it that nobody sit in the front row (29a), or that everything be in order (29b). Given the semantics outlined in Sect. 4, the meaning for (29b) can be paraphrased as “be in a world such that everything is in order by the time I get back”; in order to comply with this directive, the addressee should see to it that everything is in order.
Alternatively, one could assume that they are bound by an operator of the sort proposed in Baker (2008), which must be brought in by T and be in a more local relation with the pronoun than the Jussive head is.
Note the distinction between promissives and first person imperatives. Promissives, as seen in Korean, place a requirement on the speaker. In contrast, first person imperatives place a requirement on the addressee, but this requirement is expressed with a first person element in subject position, as in Italian (30c). The first person imperative is grammatically more parallel to the third person imperative (31b) than to the promissive.
The use of (31b) as a polite imperative is restricted to particular social situations, for example a wife to a husband.
Patrick Grosz (p.c.) has suggested that optatives may be analyzed using the same semantic/pragmatic ideas as imperatives simply by relaxing the restriction that it should be possible for the addressee to bring about the situation described. Combining this perspective with the ideas about imperative semantics summarized in Sect. 4, the “optative” use of (31b) which is translated ‘I wish he would eat’ would come about by adding something like ‘you make it the case that he eats’ to the addressee’s To-do List, but without the presupposition that the addressee can make it the case that he eats. In this situation, the addressee is committed to the judgment that a world in which he eats is preferable to one in which he doesn’t, even though we know that the addressee cannot bring the world to this preferable state.
The vocative Maitre d’ makes it much easier to get the interpretation in question, though it is not strictly necessary, if the supporting context is clear enough.
As pointed out by a reviewer, Hawaiian is another language that has been said to allow third person subjects in imperatives. The imperative in Hawaiian makes use of the particle e, which, according to Andrews (1854), Judd (1940), and Zhang (1990), is the same form employed in the paradigm for the future. According to these sources, imperative clauses containing e occur with second person subjects, as well as with first person plural and third person subjects; the subject can be null in the second person singular, and must be overt in all the other cases. This pattern suggests to us that the Jussive head in Hawaiian has second person features, as in all other languages, and this is what enables it to license a null second person subject. For the third person cases with e, it is possible that these are simply future tense declaratives, used to impose an obligation through an indirect speech act (similarly to English You WILL do it!). Alternatively, it could be that the subject enters an abstract agree relation with a different functional head (possibly the one expressing future, spelled out as e). Also relevant is the fact that, according to Judd (1940) and Elbert and Pukui (1979), e may be replaced by o, ou or i, and mai in the case of negative imperatives, in which case the subject can only be interpreted as second person. We do not know what o, ou and i are, and whether it would be justified to view them as morphological realizations of the Jussive head.
A reviewer points out some data from Tagalog that are relevant to our analysis. In this language, the second person, addressee argument of an imperative is always the agent, regardless of the verb’s voice. Thus we find examples like (i), (Schachter and Otanes 1972; Kroeger 1993):
This sentence contains a nominative recipient argument, as well as non-nominative agent and theme arguments. The agent argument is the second person element referring to the addressee, and refers to the person charged with bringing him coffee. According to our analysis, the Jussive head must bind the agent argument, transmit its second person features and produce the correct directive meaning. Yet in several respects the nominative-marked DP is syntactically the most prominent in the clause, and has been argued to be the subject (Guilfoyle et al. 1992; Kroeger 1993). If it is indeed the subject, the question arises of why the Jussive head does not agree with it.
While these points show that Tagalog raises interesting questions for our analysis, we do not yet understand the syntactic issues well enough to say whether these data constitute a problem. There are various analyses of the voice and case systems of Tagalog, and we cannot do justice here to the many positions and arguments which have been put forth. Besides the claim that the nominative marked element is a regular subject, we see the idea that it is actually an absolutive (e.g., Aldridge 2006, 2009), that it represents the element that agrees with the verb (Rackowski and Richards 2005), and that it indicates movement to an A-bar topic position (Richards 2000), among other possibilities. As discussed by Schachter (1976, 1996) and others, the agent argument retains some subject properties even when it is not nominative, such as the capacity to bind reflexives or the ability to be controlled. Moreover, we have not investigated the relevance, pointed out by Kroeger (1993: 88–90), of the Tagalog mood system. Until the field reaches a greater consensus on the analysis of these features of Tagalog, we cannot determine their exact relevance to the theory of imperatives.
One might propose that all imperatives contain a vocative, overt or covert, and that this plays the role of the topic in Huang’s theory. However, there is no analogue of a vocative for the first person cases, promissives and exhortatives.
Jussives also allow quantifiers as their subjects, but we do not discuss these cases here. A proper analysis would require a description of different types of quantificational structures, including quantificational noun phrases, floated quantifiers, and adverbial quantifiers. We do not have a full understanding of these phenomena, and even if we did, they are too complex to be treated in sufficient detail here. We note that, with a strong quantificational noun phrase, a null anaphor is preferred, but we can find both second and third person anaphors, depending on the context:
With floated or adverbial quantifiers, a null anaphor is strongly preferred, and it is therefore difficult to tell whether the subject’s features are second person:
Note that the status of quantificational subjects of imperatives in other languages is also controversial and complex (see Platzack and Rosengren 1998; Potsdam 1998; Zanuttini 2008).
In English, but not Korean, it is possible for a referential noun phrase in a declarative or interrogative to refer to a member of the set of addressees. Such a noun phrase neither has second person feature nor is able to refer to the addressee per se. Thus, in (i), your can refer to a group of which Noah is a member, but not to Noah:
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(i)
Yesterday Noah picked your (=Noah and Ben’s) bedtime story (so today Ben can).
We assume that, in this use, the relation between the subject and the addressee is coincidental, i.e., not grammatically represented.
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(i)
Rizzi (1997) proposes a ForceP as the highest projection in the CP domain. Clearly jussive particles are not in this position, because they are lower than the overt complementizer.
This position might be in the higher IP or lower CP domain; some of the literature has identified a MoodP in this general area (Ahn and Yoon 1990; Cinque 1999; Brandner 2004). In that case, the Jussive head that we discuss is equivalent to the Mood head with the special property of containing person features.
Second person singular negative imperatives in Italian, which employ an infinitival form, have been argued to contain a null element (Kayne 1992), and one might identify this element with a null operator or null modal. However, other imperative forms, including polite imperatives in Italian and negative imperatives in Spanish, do not show such evidence (see Han 1998). Second, imperatives are used not only to give orders, but also to perform a variety of other directive speech acts. For example, they may be used to give permission or to suggest (e.g., Davies 1986; Portner 2007, Charlow 2011, Kaufmann 2012):
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(i)
Have a glass of wine, if you like. (permission)
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(ii)
Take the #3 bus. (suggestion)
Thus, in order for this approach to be plausible, we would need to modify (39) in such a way that it encodes a general directive act type which subsumes ordering, permitting, suggesting, and the like. It is not, however, a simple matter to develop speech act theory in a way that makes sense of such a general act type (see Recanati 1987; Vanderveken 1990, 2002; Alston 2000 for relevant foundational work).
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(i)
In Korean, one piece of evidence in favor of the modal view might come from the distribution of the negative marker -mal. This element occurs with deontic modals in all clause types (cf. Han and Lee 2007); hence, its presence in jussive clauses can be seen as evidence for the presence of a (covert) modal. However, an alternative would be to consider its distribution as being semantically, rather than syntactically determined; that is, -mal might be restricted to clauses that express modal concepts, i.e., obligation, permission or preference, based on rules, morality and the like, whether or not a modal operator is syntactically present.
A similar point was made for exclamatives by Zanuttini and Portner (2003).
us(c) is a group consisting of the speaker and addressee(s) in c.
In Sect. 3.2.2, we showed that some languages allow for imperatives where the Jussive head does not agree with the subject. In these cases, the Jussive head does not bind anything in the vP, and the resulting meaning of a sentence like (31b), for example, is [λx:x=addressee(c),[λw.he eats in w]]. Intuitively, this places a requirement on the addressee that is only satisfied if the referent of he eats.
Note that, as they stand, the rules work correctly for distributive predicates, but not for collective predicates, e.g. Let’s meet later! Since our focus in this paper is syntax and the syntax/semantics interface, it would take us too far afield to integrate a proper analysis of the collective/distributive distinction.
We are not entirely sure of whether it is only the Jussive head that exhibits person features in Korean. Several authors have proposed that honorification in Japanese and Korean be analyzed as involving agreement between the person features of T and those of a noun phrase; see Ahn (2002), Tsujioka (2002), Boecks and Niinuma (2004), and Boeckx (2008), among others. This analysis is controversial (cf. Bobaljik and Yatsushiro 2006); but if correct, then Korean exhibits two functional heads that may agree in person features. In any case, our proposal goes against the commonly held view that some languages, like Korean and Japanese, lack ϕ-feature agreement all together. Besides the literature on honorification just cited, there is other recent work proposing that these languages exhibit agreement; see Miyagawa (2007, 2009).
Some other differences among jussive types exist as well, but we do not have room to discuss them in this paper. Here (due to space constraints) we had to limit ourselves to focusing on the fact that they have similar illocutionary forces and share parallel restrictions on their subjects, and we could not offer a full discussion of all their similarities and differences.
An infinitive, instead of a subjunctive, is usually required when the subjects of the main and embedded clauses are the same.
Farkas (1992) claims to have a solution for this problem in terms of the concept of intensional anchoring. However, the semantics of ‘order’ and ‘promise’ are not given in detail, and so the explanation cannot be considered convincing as currently offered. Portner and Rubinstein (to appear) discuss mood selection in French and offer an explanation for the fact that ‘promise’ takes the indicative, as well as solutions to several other mood-selection puzzles.
Focusing on Spanish, Villalta (2008) proposes that the two verbs differ in terms of whether they evaluate contextual alternatives, arguing that this semantic difference is revealed in the fact that ‘order’ is focus sensitive while ‘promise’ is not. Villalta’s analysis of mood selection is certainly the most complete yet developed, but we are not convinced that there’s really a difference between (i) and (ii):
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(i)
His father ordered that Ted {MARRY Alice/marry ALICE}.
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(ii)
Ted promised to {MARRY Alice/marry ALICE}.
In particular, it isn’t obvious that there’s a truth conditional difference between the two focus patterns in (i), but not in (ii), as claimed by Villalta.
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(i)
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Acknowledgements
This research was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation awarded to Paul Portner and Raffaella Zanuttini (BCS-0234278, “Clause Types: Form and Force in Grammatical Theory”). We would like acknowledge the important contributions of Simon Mauck, who served as a research assistant during the early stages of this project. We thank the audiences at GURT 2004, the 2004 Linguistic Society of Korea conference, the 14th Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference (2004), the LSA Summer Institute (2005), the Sixième Colloque de Syntaxe et Sémantique à Paris (2005), the DGfS/GLOW Summer School (2006), NELS 37 (2006), the 16th International Conference on Korean Linguistics (2008). We are very grateful to Bob Frank, Tom Leu, Young-Key Kim-Renaud, Shigeru Miyagawa, Mike Diercks and Jong-Un Park for their valuable insights throughout the various stages of this research. Finally, we thank Marcel den Dikken and the NLLT reviewers for their insightful comments, which have helped us clarify many aspects of this article.
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Zanuttini, R., Pak, M. & Portner, P. A syntactic analysis of interpretive restrictions on imperative, promissive, and exhortative subjects. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 30, 1231–1274 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-012-9176-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-012-9176-2