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How to Handle Imperatives in Semantics

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Interpreting Imperatives

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

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Abstract

Standard approaches to identify the denotations of natural language expressions fail for imperatives, which don’t relate directly to either truth or information exchange. In a first step, possible strategies to provide a semantic interpretation for imperatives are classified according to three parameters, namely, (i) how they represent utterance contexts (split vs. uniform representationalism), (ii) if the interpretation is static vs. dynamic, and (iii) what objects are adopted as possible denotata. In a second step, four proposals offered in the literature for a semantic treatment of imperatives are discussed along the lines of these three parameters and evaluated critically. The last part of the chapter introduces the analysis of imperatives as modalized propositions to be developed in the rest of the book and provides some independent motivation for it.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Lewis’s conception is easily integrated into our picture of the utterance context if we assume that PS is a function that assigns each context c its permissibility sphere PS (c).

  2. 2.

    Lewis himself acknowledges that he does not try to offer an account for how this self-verification works. My analysis aims to account for the non-descriptive behavior of propositional meanings assigned to imperatives and performative modals in general.

  3. 3.

    For a simple example, consider the following. Suppose that the speaker has obliged the addressee to clean all and only the speaker’s watches. Now, the speaker has forgotten that the watch in the top-most drawer of her desk belongs to her, too (mistakenly, she thinks its her grandfather’s). Should Lewis’s permissibility sphere entail that the addressee cleans this watch?

  4. 4.

    But see Section 2.2.2 on van Rooy’s (2000) treatment of performative modal verbs.

  5. 5.

    For the sake of completeness, we can assume that questions also affect the context set, but nothing hinges on that. I will not spell out how the representation of contexts has to be enriched to distinguish whether a question has been raised (the belief state is partitioned) or not. For an implementation, cf. the framework of inquisitive semantics (Groenendijk and Roelofsen, 2009).

  6. 6.

    Two operators O and P are dual if the inner negation of one is equivalent to the outer negation of the other, \([{\ensuremath{\lambda}}p.O ({\ensuremath{\neg}} p)] = [{\ensuremath{\lambda}}p.{\ensuremath{\neg}} P (p)]\).

  7. 7.

    Cf. Mastop (2005) for a different view on the issue. He refers to von Wright (1996), who treats this assumption as a closure condition on artificial systems of permissibility, as e.g. the law for a political unit. Mastop offers an elaboration of the non-dual view within a system of partial update semantics.

  8. 8.

    In contrast, Rohrbaugh (1997) considers Lewis’ problem about permission a knock-down argument against a possible worlds analysis for deontic speech acts in general. As an alternative, he spells out a partial update structure which allows for adding and removing paths (cf. Rohrbaugh, 1997, for details).

  9. 9.

    The following discussion of static theories is confined to this classical conception, i.e. to static theories that assign privileged status to truth conditions/values. E.g., I will not try to provide a comparison with situation semantic theories (cf. Barwise and Perry, 1983).

  10. 10.

    Ignoring questions of possible truth-value gaps.

  11. 11.

    Groenendijk and Roelofsen’s (2009) Inquisitive Semantics aims to explicitly account for the step between the decision of whether an assertion is to be accepted and the actual modification of the context.

  12. 12.

    The theory I will develop in the following chapters argues that it is indeed particular constraints on the contexts in which imperatives can be used—spelled out in Section 4.2—that prevent the intuition that imperatives are true or false.

  13. 13.

    Note that it is uncontroversial that imperatives do not refer to individuals under the standard e/t dichotomy of semantic reference.

  14. 14.

    It actually goes back to a footnote in Katz and Postal (1964).

  15. 15.

    See Section 1.2 for arguments against an analysis for functions other than ordering/commanding as indirect speech acts.

  16. 16.

    ‘All imperatives are expressed by the word ought [or shall] and thereby indicate the relation of an objective law of reason to a will, … , They say that something would be good to do or to forbear.’ (Kant, 1959:35).

  17. 17.

    Ross’s original example is Either slip the letter into the letter-box or burn it! Ross (1944:41).

  18. 18.

    Although Han does not say so explicitly, this is what her analysis amounts to. According to her, imperatives are interpreted as expressing necessity w.r.t. an ideal set of worlds that is obtained by intersecting the set of propositions known to the speaker and applying a deontic ordering source to which the imperative is added. As the constrained operator is not combined with a nuclear scope argument, the standard Kratzer (1991b) semantics Han claims to draw on should result in an object of type \({\langle st,t \rangle}\). For details on Kratzer’s semantics of modal verbs as well as an alternative theory of imperatives in terms of modal operators, see Sections 2.3, 3.1.3 and Chapter 3.

  19. 19.

    For sentences like (7), Schwager (2006b) independently derives an analysis along these lines from her you should-analysis of imperatives. Details and problems (all of which affect Han’s proposal as well) are discussed in Section 6.3.

  20. 20.

    Note also that her analysis faces obvious problems with embedding in other contexts, e.g. conditional disjunctions:

    Table 8
    Full size table
  21. 21.

    For problems with the interpretation of temporality and in particular temporal quantification in Mastop’s (2005) system, see Section 3.2.2.

  22. 22.

    Here, imperatives differ from other operators, as, generally, outscoping other operators does not automatically lead to specificity:

    Table 12
    Full size table

    If may in (i) is understood deontically, but with a source of obligation different from the speaker, the wide scope reading for most of these books is perfectly compatible with the speaker being ignorant as to what particular books verify the quantification. The fact that imperatives differ in that they require speaker specificity for wide scope quantifiers seems to be a side effect of their inherently performative nature. For reasons of space, I cannot attempt an in-depth analysis of specificity and wide scope quantifiers. Intuitively, the restriction should be made to follow from the authority condition (see Section 4.2.2). Compare also its relations to rhetorical effects for questions, see Section 2.3.3.3.

  23. 23.

    Note that this shows more generally that, at least in German, specific DPs can appear in imperatives, pace Portner (2004). Cases he deems unacceptable in English are grammatical in German and involve the same bridge accent:

    Table 14
    Full size table
  24. 24.

    I.e. modal verbs in sentences that describe modal affairs (i.e., what is deontically/epistemically/teleologically/… possible or necessary) and modal verbs that change such states of affairs see Section 2.1.1; for detailed discussion of the phenomenon as well as an opposing conclusion, see Section 2.3.1 below.

  25. 25.

    Throughout the paper, van Rooy develops various refinements to account for conjunctions, disjunctions and lumping. For our purposes, these details can be ignored.

  26. 26.

    The analyses in the book (Asher and Lascarides, 2003b) and the article (Asher and Lascarides, 2003a) are similar apart from a minor detail with respect to the treatment of disjunction and how to avoid Ross’ paradox, which is irrelevant to our concerns here. My presentation follows the article.

  27. 27.

    Their approach is couched in the framework of SDRT (Segmented Discourse Representation Theory), a dynamic variant of DRT (Kamp and Reyle, 1993) that models the construction of discourse representations by taking into account the effect of rhetorical relations. Linguistic expressions are interpreted as building up discourse representations that are conceived of as relations between sets of world-assignment pairs constituting pre- and post-belief states. In the following, I will abstract away from discourse referents and will treat the belief states as sets of worlds. See Asher and Lascarides (2003b) for details.

  28. 28.

    The concept of an action term is taken from Segerberg (1990), who proposes it in order to interpret imperatives in a static framework. The goal is to ensure the non-propositional behavior of imperatives with respect to truth values and disjunction introduction (Ross’ paradox, see Section 2.1.2).

  29. 29.

    The phenomenon of modal subordination was discovered for epistemic contexts like (i).

    Table 22
    Full size table

    Subtle differences between epistemic modals on the one hand, and deontic modals and imperatives on the other hand, are discussed in Chapter 6; these concern in particular the necessity of anaphoric elements like then.

  30. 30.

    < is a strict partial order (irreflexive, transitive). Note that Portner uses < for the inverse relation of what Lewis (1973) and Kratzer (1991b) use it for; for Portner, \(u <_i w\) means that i has more of the properties in i ′s To-Do List in w, than i has in u. That is, w is ‘better’ according to TDL(i) than u.

  31. 31.

    Portner adopts Heim and Kratzer’s (1998) convention of indicating presuppositions on argument variables between a colon and the dot that precedes the value term.

  32. 32.

    This particular problem has already been pointed out by Bierwisch (1980) in connection with a proposal by Hausser (1980), who also assumes that imperatives denote properties and from this tries to derive their discourse behavior.

  33. 33.

    Portner’s (2007) formulation contains an additional parameter h for modal flavors (cf. Kratzer, 1978), which regulates whether an imperative is used as a Command, a Recommendation or a Wish. The parameter also induces a definedness condition on the update with an imperative. These details can be ignored for the moment.

  34. 34.

    For simple imperatives, the rule in (24) renders superfluous the restriction that its semantic meaning carries the addressee presupposition. But it seems that this assumption is still crucial to capture that even grammatical third person subjects as in (ia) or (iia) presuppose that the imperative subject is (one of) the addressees.

    Table 26
    Full size table
    Table 27
    Full size table

    For (ia), the interaction with the To-Do List update is straightforward (although, as far as I can tell, ‘\({\textrm{John}} \in x\)’ and ‘\({\textrm{Mary}} \in x\)’ should be part of the domain restriction, not the at issue meaning). But it is unclear how the To-Do List update works for (iia) (and in particular, corresponding examples with non-universal quantifiers like for example somebody). Are there To-Do Lists of plural addressees, and if so, how do they interact with the To-Do Lists for the individuals the plural addressees are composed of?

    In Section 3.2.4, I provide an alternative solution to the addressee-restrictedness of imperatives.

  35. 35.

    ‘Pragmatic’ in the sense of Section 1.1.3, i.e. that the pairing of the imperative form-type and the canonical function of Ordering is not mediated (exclusively) by the imperative’s semantic meaning. This contrasts with the question posed in Section 2.1.3 which regards the nature of the semantic denotation of the imperative and whether it makes reference to speech acts, i.e. inherently pragmatic objects.

  36. 36.

    Portner claims that this is similar for Invitations and Advice, which come with an addressee-bouletic and teleological flavor respectively. Consider (i)

    Table 29
    Full size table

    Intuitively, it does not seem right to say that this makes true that according to what the addressee wants, it is best that he takes a piece of fruit (as would be predicted if deontic and bouletic modality worked on a par). In the Kratzer-style framework Portner is employing, an addressee-bouletic modal expresses what follows given the circumstances if additionally as many as possible of the addressee’s wishes come true. At least for invitations it seems incorrect to add imperatives (applied to the addressee) to these wishes of the addressee (in Kratzer’s account, the addressee bouletic ordering source), in the same sense as the content of an order is added to the set of propositions that specify ‘what is commanded’. Imperatives simply do not change the wishes of the addressee. For more details on Kratzer’s modal framework and its relevance to imperatives of all flavors, see Chapters 3 and 4. Recent work on anankastic conditionals and teleological modality (e.g. von Fintel and Iatridou, 2005) suggests that the relation may be more complicated even in the case of Advice

  37. 37.

    Roughly, the effect is achieved by ruling out worlds from the context set at which standard Kratzerian parameters (modal base and ordering source) do not assign sets of propositions that verify the corresponding necessity. For details on standard Kratzer semantics, see Section 3.1; for this particular application to imperatives, cf. Portner (2007).

  38. 38.

    Pace Portner (2005) who claims that the predictions are correct for inert addressees.

  39. 39.

    Problems for the appropriate interaction of facts about modal states of affairs (i.e., what the law is like) and orderings are well known from the literature on conditionals, cf. Frank (1996), Saebø (2001), von Fintel and Iatridou (2005).

  40. 40.

    Unless presuppositions in general are considered a dynamic phenomenon independently, an issue I will not take a stance on in this book. In any case, there is nothing specific to the imperative that would require a dynamic treatment.

  41. 41.

    In a footnote, Portner (1997) also suggests that his truth-conditional analysis of imperatives would have to be supplemented along such lines: ‘… assigning truth conditions to an imperative might lead one to expect that it could be judged true or false. I believe that the solution to why it cannot be requires a better understanding of the relation between semantics and pragmatics, in particular speech act theory, than we currently have. The same issue arises for indicatives used as performatives, sentences which I would assume to have their normal truth conditions.’ (p. 207, fn. 23). In Portner (2005, 2007), he abandons this strategy and proposes a non-truth conditional analysis for imperatives and, tentatively, performative modal verbs (must).

  42. 42.

    Below, I will argue that this is too strong and that one can find instances of descriptive deontic must in main clauses as well.

  43. 43.

    Cf. Grosz (2008b) for a proponent of the underspecification hypothesis with respect to the quantificational force of the modal operator in imperatives.

  44. 44.

    The only exceptions are for example-imperatives which I take to reveal that the semantics assigned in Chapter 3 must not be considered primitive but results from an underlying atomic semantics and an obligatory operation of exhaustification.

  45. 45.

    Note that this is a special version of the you should-reduction discussed by Hamblin (1987); see Section 2.1.2. It is more specific in that I have made explicit that we are dealing with performative you should. Hypothesis 2.2 is meant to take into account only the at-issue content.

  46. 46.

    Example from Paul Portner (p.c.).

  47. 47.

    ‘a truth conditional analysis of imperatives gives rise to the expectation that command and permission sentences can be iterated, or embedded into one another, which in fact seems impossible.’ (van Rooy, 2000:121)

  48. 48.

    That prediction may not arise if the connection were analysed as an instance of regular polysemy. Unfortunately, to this point, I am not aware of a non-uniform treatment that works out the link between descriptive and performative reading.

  49. 49.

    Counter-examples to Ninan’s generalization were first pointed out to me by Jonathan Shaheen (p.c.) and Craige Roberts (p.c.).

  50. 50.

    www.intodns.com/cpaneldnscluster.com. I am indebted to Lisa Matthewson (p.c.) for pointing out that this sequence may still feel contradictory, partly because of the also. Yet, it becomes acceptable if the second sentences is replaced with But having 2 nameservers is ok as far as I am concerned. This modified example can still be used to make the same point.

  51. 51.

    Modulo differences that might be caused by the fact that presuppositions can trigger accomodation.

  52. 52.

    Consequently, for Portner, the only modal verb that qualifies as performative (in his sense) is must, if Ninan were right in assuming that all its main clause appearances were non-assertive. In contrast, for me, most deontic modal verbs can be both descriptive and performative.

  53. 53.

    I don’t want to take a stance as to whether there are speech acts that can be executed with imperatives, yet would also meet all the criteria of an Assertion (Advice being an example in question). If this is so, a speech act theory should label a transition by the strongest label(s) such that the corresponding speech act(s) is/are intentionally executed and recognized as such.

  54. 54.

    Note that adding a linguistic object to CG already satisfies some of the transitional characteristics of an Assertion. At the same time, it can already be a stronger effect: in Section 1.4 I have described a successful Assertion as requiring only that it becomes mutual joint belief that the speaker believes the proposition asserted, not that the proposition itself becomes mutual joint belief.

  55. 55.

    For a technical representation of what it means for an information state to be partitioned, cf. Groenendijk and Roelofsen (2009).

  56. 56.

    If further clause types (e.g. exclamatives) correspond to further logical types, the account has to be enriched (but see Portner and Zanuttini, 1999, and Roguska, 2005, for two recent approaches that both assign uniform logical types to interrogatives and exclamatives).

  57. 57.

    Note that this is similar to the distinction between inquisitive and non-inquisitive semantic denotata as drawn in inquisitive semantics, cf. Groenendijk and Roelofsen (2009).

  58. 58.

    The data was first tested informally on 10 native speakers of German. Only one of them disagreed with my judgment. Kaufmann and Poschmann (2011) discuss an experimental survey that confirms this contrast.

  59. 59.

    The data I am concerned with in this section should not be confused with the wh-imperatives Reis and Rosengren (1992) consider. They are concerned with imperative clauses that contain a wh-item in preverbal position which has been moved there out of an embedded interrogative.

    Table 63
    Full size table

    In cases like (i), the matrix clause is unambiguously typed as an imperative.

  60. 60.

    Marina Stoyanova (p.c.) points out that the same phenomenon seems to be available in Bulgarian. But in contrast to questions formed with declarative verbs, the wh-phrases have to remain in situ in these cases. Whatever syntactic mechanism is responsible for that restriction may have interesting connections with the encoding of speaker authority.

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    Magdalena Kaufmann

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© 2012 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.

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Kaufmann, M. (2012). How to Handle Imperatives in Semantics. In: Interpreting Imperatives. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, vol 88. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2269-9_2

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