Imperatives Key Topics in Semantics and Pragmatics Series

Imperative sentences usually occur in speech acts such as orders, requests, and pleas. However, they are also used to give advice, and to grant permission, and are sometimes found in advertisements, good wishes and conditional constructions. Yet, the relationship between the form of imperatives, and the wide range of speech acts in which they occur, remains unclear, as do the ways in which semantic theory should handle imperatives. This book is the first to look systematically at both the data and the theory. The first part discusses data from a large set of languages, including many outside the Indo-European family, and analyses in detail the range of uses to which imperatives are put, paying particular attention to controversial cases. This provides the empirical background for the second part, where the authors offer an accessible, comprehensive and in-depth discussion of the major theoretical accounts of imperative semantics and pragmatics.

Part I. The Data: 1. What is the imperative mood?; 2. Imperative mood and directive force; 3. Imperatives with conditional meanings; Part II. The Theories; Introduction to Part II: from data to theory; 4. The imperative is directive force; 5. Declarative-like semantics for imperatives; 6. The imperative as a distinct semantic type; An opinionated conclusion; Appendix A. Possible worlds and semantics; Appendix B. Modality in possible-word semantics; Appendix C. Stalnaker's common-ground model of assertion; Glossary.

Mark Jary is Reader in English Language and Linguistics at the University of Roehampton. He has written widely on semantics, pragmatics and philosophy of language and is the author of Assertion (2010).
Mikhail Kissine is Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. He has written widely on semantics, pragmatics and philosophy of language and is the author of From Utterances to Speech Acts (Cambridge University Press, 2013).