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Interpreting Imperatives pp 1–27Cite as

Setting the Scene

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Part of the book series: Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy ((SLAP,volume 88))

Abstract

This chapter explores the classification of natural language sentences into declaratives, interrogatives, imperatives (and possibly further types) as it is commonly applied both by descriptive grammarians and by theoretical linguists. It is argued that, to be crosslinguistically applicable, these concepts should be understood as clause types, i.e. as sentence level form types that are prototypically linked to a particular type of speech act (an illocutionary force). Any theory of clause types is faced with two puzzles: (i) how to account for the prototypical link between form type and function types, and (ii) how to predict which function a particular sentence is used for in its utterance context, given that this need not be the prototypical form type associated with the respective clause type (for imperatives in particular, the range of possible speech act types is noted as the problem of functional inhomogeneity). It is argued that (i) should be answered in semantics, that is, in terms of the interpretation assigned to each clause type. An answer to (ii) can then be derived from the interaction of this semantic interpretation together with the particular settings of the utterance context. After discussing some intricacies in carving out the imperative clause type and some theoretical considerations on the status of indirect speech acts, the chapter concludes with an outline of a reference framework for the semantics-pragmatics interface.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Cf. Sadock and Zwicky (1985).

  2. 2.

    In her recent handbook article on imperatives, Han (t.a.) asserts plainly:

    Imperatives cannot be said to be true or false. They do not assert anything about the current world and so it does not make sense to assign a truth value to imperatives.

  3. 3.

    Published posthumuously.

  4. 4.

    Broadie (1972) reserves ‘imperative’ for commands and orders and coins ‘imperation’ for the larger class of conduct-guiding conversational moves.

  5. 5.

    Modals under such a usage are called performative modals, see Section 2.3.1.

  6. 6.

    A North American Indian language which belongs to the Yuman family and is spoken in Arizona.

  7. 7.

    A family of North American Indian languages spoken in Northern and Central California.

  8. 8.

    The elements in K are often called illocutionary forces, cf. e.g. Gazdar (1981), who reserves ‘speech acts’ for the combination of sentence meaning and illocutionary force in a concrete utterance. Speech act types would then most likely be categories of speech acts comprising the sentence meaning, e.g. the type of ‘commanding someone to pass the salt’, a concept I have not reserved a term for. For me, the corresponding speech act type is just ‘commanding’. I avoid the term ‘illocutionary force’ because of the heavy bias it seems to have achieved in favor of the literal meaning hypothesis, cf. Section 1.2.

  9. 9.

    Cf. Carlson (1977), Kratzer (1995) for the distinction between stage and individual level predicates. It has been claimed at various points that individual level predicates cannot be imperativized (cf. e.g. Han, 2000). I do not think that this is correct. (5b) is a perfectly natural thought (or, rather silent wish) for someone on their way to a blind date, hoping that the person they are about to meet would be blond.

  10. 10.

    An anonymous reviewer points out that this decision is not uncontroversial. I still believe that there is enough motivation for it. Firstly, declaratives and interrogatives are not affected by similar considerations. Secondly, even for (some) individual level predicates, the question of whether they are under the control of the subject depends on world knowledge—for example, under appropriate assumptions about magical abilities, whether one is blond or not could be chosen by the subject at birth and then be settled for the rest of their life. In that case, be blond would still behave like an individual predicate (e.g. with respect to temporal quantification), yet, (5b) could constitute a felicitous Order to a newborn. At the same time, our assumptions about magical powers do not seem to change the semantics of the verb. Thirdly, (5b) could be used as an Advice or an Order if the speaker wants to mock the addressee. The result strikes me as an insincere speech act rather than a non-literal use of the verb.

  11. 11.

    A Siouan language spoken in Montana.

  12. 12.

    A cover term for three closely related North American Indian languages spoken in California.

  13. 13.

    Cf. Wratil (2005). Unfortunately, many of the data in typologically oriented discussions of imperatives come from descriptive grammars that are not supported by theoretically informed semantic and pragmatic investigations. Therefore, some caution is warranted.

  14. 14.

    A (Lezgi-Samur) Dagestan language spoken in Azerbaijan.

  15. 15.

    One of the core questions in the analysis of third person imperatives is if the addressee still figures prominently as the one to bring about the action of someone else doing what is requested, or if any such effect should rather be treated as an epiphenomenon, maybe due to Gricean implicatures (Grice, 1975a).

  16. 16.

    Compare Sadock and Zwicky (1985) for arguments against an independent clause type ‘denial’.

  17. 17.

    The latter two types are cross-linguistically rare. Pak et al. (2004) discuss their status in Korean.

  18. 18.

    ‘Semantics’ in the sense of Cresswell’s (1973:238) ‘semantic pragmatics’, namely as concerned with meaning as a function from contexts to senses. That is, the way in which context produces the sense is part of the meaning. This contrasts with Montague’s (1974) view of semantics as completely independent of contextual notions.

  19. 19.

    Gazdar (1981) introduces ‘normal utterance’ for utterances that are used to perform a speech act (in contrast, for example, to utterances that are used to test a microphone).

  20. 20.

    In particular, it is not the case that one is more specific as the other.

  21. 21.

    Ultimately, the distinction of whether a linguistic object achieves a particular speech act type directly or via the recognition of some other speech act type can only be answered by empirical study (for discussion of early experiments, see Noveck and Sperber, 2004). Thereby, it may also turn out that conventionalized indirect speech acts like Could you pass me the salt, please are truly different from non-conventionalized ones. Maybe they do not rely on the recognition of the underlying speech act type but are already grammaticalized as minor clause types with their own particular meaning. This issue is left aside as orthogonal to the investigation I am pursuing here.

  22. 22.

    Billy Strayhorn, via Sæbø (2002).

  23. 23.

    Example from Hamblin (1987).

  24. 24.

    It is particularly interesting that this spectrum of usages is even available in languages that have more specialized forms grammaticalized to express one or the other of them (e.g. Korean marks permissives as distinct clause type different from imperatives or declaratives, yet it can still employ imperatives to convey Permissions), cf. Pak et al. (2004).

  25. 25.

    Searle and Vanderveken (1985:181) acknowledge two readings of the English speech act verb advise. According to them, when construed with a that-clause it describes an assertive act of presenting something as the optimal solution, whereas when construed with a to-infinitival, it describes a directive act of trying to get the addressee to do something. Without taking any stance on this syntactic distinction, addressing exchanges like (i), I intend my label Advice to describe a speech act that does not require the speaker to have any preference for the prejacent to be acted on (hence, not directive), yet, it requires that the propositional content be constituted by a future act of the addressee and that the speaker somehow accept or endorse the addressee’s goals. Hence, while Searle and Vanderveken (1985) would classify it as an assertive speech act, it differs from an Assertion:

    (i)

    A: How do I get to Harlem?

    		 
     

    B: Take the A-train.

    Advice

    See Section 4.2 for the relevant notion of endorsement.

  26. 26.

    An anonymous reviewer points out that the cross-linguistic existence of ambiguities may be less unexpected if such ambiguities result along the path of grammaticalization processes, for instance. This point is certainly worth considering. In general, I think that such expressions or constructions should be treated as semantically uniform or polysemous (i.e., sharing a semantic core) as far as possible—in that sense, the burden of proof that two surface structures no longer share a common semantic core is on the objector. Now, in the given case, there is little evidence that imperatives used for Orders, Advice or Wishes may show different degrees of grammaticalization. It seems that we are dealing with one and the same morphosyntactic construction that can be used for various types of speech acts. But note that this is less clear for imperatives occurring below the speech act level, e.g. (15), Therefore, in Section 6.3, I offer detailed arguments that these cases, too, are formally and semantically identical to ordinary imperatives.

  27. 27.

    The deliberately vague notion of ‘determining’ will be discussed in detail in Chapter 2.

  28. 28.

    Translated into my framework by substituting ‘speech act type’ for ‘illocutionary force’. Note that Gazdar/Searle sees Request as the prototypical function of an imperative.

  29. 29.

    My view is similar to Hausser’s (1980):

    Syntactic mood does not determine the speech act. Rather, syntactic mood participates with all the other linguistic properties of a given surface expression ϕ in delimiting the set of use-conditions of ϕ . Since there is no one to one relation between syntactic moods and speech acts, it would be a mistake to implement speech act properties in the semantic characterization of syntactic mood.

    (Hausser, 1980:73)

  30. 30.

    In contrast to Dummett, Frege states explicitly that the sense of a declarative is a thought (ein Gedanke), but the sense of an imperative is not.

  31. 31.

    Even if generally accepted, this criterion has not gone completely undisputed. See e.g. Kamp (1978) for early arguments in favor of letting pragmatics (certain implicatures) enter the recursive component of meaning assignment. More recently, consider also work on scalar implicatures, cf. Chierchia et al. (t.a.).

  32. 32.

    While I will not offer a theory of how further indirect speech acts are inferred from a primary direct speech act, I will try not to dismiss too quickly alternative solutions in terms of indirect speech acts.

  33. 33.

    The addressee parameter is added for simplicity. Strictly speaking, a context is already uniquely determined by the corresponding triple that excludes the addressee c A (cf. Lewis, 1980). Given c S , c T and c W , c A can always be determined as the person c S is addressing at c T in c W .

  34. 34.

    Thereby we constrain the notion of ‘context’ in the sense of Kaplan (1989); for discussion cf. Zimmermann (1997).

  35. 35.

    For a formal definition of mutual joint belief, cf. Stalnaker (2002) and Fagin et al. (1995). Note that all alternatives according to mutual joint belief for a given utterance context have to agree on what is mutual joint belief of speaker and hearer.

  36. 36.

    The set of logical types for any given natural language L consists of (i) the five primitive logical types, and, (ii) if α and β are logical types, \(\langle{\alpha,\beta}\rangle\) is a logical type. An expression of logical type α is interpreted as referring to something in the corresponding domain D α . The domain \(D_{\langle\alpha,\beta\rangle}\) of a complex logical type \(\langle\alpha,\beta\rangle\) is the set of functions from D α to D β .

  37. 37.

    Throughout this book I will not distinguish between sets and their characteristic functions. In other words, functions χ A of type \(\langle{\alpha ,t}\rangle\) for any logical type α will often be treated as the largest subset A of D α s.t. χ A maps all elements of A to the truth-value 1.

  38. 38.

    The metalinguistic aspects of an assertion are not modelled explicitly by Stalnaker (1978). For an implementation, cf. e.g. Roberts (1996).

  39. 39.

    Ultimately, I believe that the rule based approach to speech acts should be replaced by an intentional treatment (cf. Bach and Harnish, 1979). The speaker’s utterance has to meet something like Grice’s (1975a) intentionality condition. This assures that the context transformation is indeed brought about by a speaker who employed his utterance with a particular communicative intention (cf. Grice, 1975b, for extensive discussion of all kinds of pathological cases concerning this condition, and a precise notion of the principle). For our particular concerns, this difference does not play a crucial role, and I will ignore it in the following.

  40. 40.

    Searle’s examples make clear that he does not intend the propositional content to be the output of the compositional semantic component, e.g. the propositional content of Thanks! can be ‘that you showed me the way’.

  41. 41.

    It has to be noticed that—without explicit discussion of the differences—Searle’s examples are not entirely systematic. For example, in some cases, preparatory conditions are spelled out as epistemic requirements ‘has reason to believe that’ (for Warnings), in other cases, they require both facts about the world and a certain status ‘c A is able to do A. c S believes that c A can do A’ (Requests).

  42. 42.

    Zeevat (2003) distinguishes explicitly between the aim that the speaker wants to achieve and the minimal effect. The former can be of various kinds and it does not depend on the speaker alone whether she is going to reach it. The latter is the effect the utterance will achieve simply in virtue of being perceived and recognized as such (with the intended speech act type). For example, for a Warning it is sufficient that the addressee realizes that the speaker considers the given situation dangerous (minimal effect), while it is not necessary that she acts on it and avoids whatever she was warned of (aim).

  43. 43.

    Strictly speaking, c ′ and c ″ are not utterance contexts as no linguistic object c E is uttered in them. We can consider them as paracontexts that agree with c on all parameters apart from the linguistic object and the temporal parameter c T (which is shifted backward/forward minimally).

  44. 44.

    In the meantime, many aspects have been recognized that require additions to the Stalnakerian picture even for pure information exchange, e.g. discourse referents (cf. Heim, 1982; Kamp and Reyle, 1993; Groenendijk et al., 1996), epistemic modals (cf. Veltman, 1996), consideration of a proposition for update (cf. Roberts, 1996; Groenendijk and Roelofsen, 2009), discourse particles and awareness (Karagjosova, 2004; de Jager, 2009). For all of these phenomena the literature contains proposals of additional mechanisms that work on the contextual representation in terms of common ground/context set as is and do not require an enrichment of the latter. The difference will become clear during the discussion in Section 2.1.1.

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  1. Department of Linguistics/Courant Research Centre “Text Structures”, University of Göttingen, Käte-Hamburger-Weg, 3, 37073, Göttingen, Germany

    Magdalena Kaufmann

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Kaufmann, M. (2012). Setting the Scene. In: Interpreting Imperatives. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, vol 88. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2269-9_1

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