Please join us for this week’s Ling-lunch:
Patrick Grosz
“Particle-izing Imperatives”
Thursday, Oct. 23
12:30-1:45
32-D461
>The semantics of imperatives has been in the focus of recent research such as
Portner (2005, 2007) and Schwager (2005, 2006). Schwager assumes a covert
performative modal with universal force. Portner claims that imperatives do not
encode modal force and suggests a pragmatic account in which imperatives
contribute to the hearer?s To-Do List and a rational speaker aims to realize
as many entries on her To-Do List as possible. To account for the difference
between universal, “commanding” imperatives and existential, “permissive”
imperatives, Schwager (2005) develops a pragmatic account that crucially
assumes that the hearer has already wanted to carry out the action expressed in
the imperative, but has felt that it was prohibited to do so (see also Han 2000
in this context). In contrast, Portner (2007) suggests that such differences
are linked to various sections of the hearer’s To-Do List, corresponding to
different ordering sources (e.g. orders are deontic and invitations/permissions
are bouletic, referring to the hearer’s wishes). Crucially, both assume that
imperatives always express “necessity” and the feeling of “possibility” is a
derived effect. In this talk I show that this cannot be correct.
>In this talk I revisit the semantics of imperatives in the light of the
German discourse particles JA (pronounce: “stressed JA”, homophonous with ja
‘yes’) and ruhig (homophonous with ruhig ‘quietly’). These elements occur only
in imperatives and in modalized declaratives, but not in non-modalized
declaratives. They restrict the modal type of the modal operator they occur
with, and are sensitive to modal force (JA only combines with universal force
and ruhig with existential force). I show that the distribution of JA and ruhig
can only be accounted for by assuming that imperatives contain a covert element
that introduces modal necessity or modal possibility. The empirical evidence
thus favors an approach that assumes an element introducing modal
quantification (such as Schwager’s) over an approach that does not involve
quantification (such as Portner’s). However, it also requires a fundamental
revision of Schwager, in that we need to assume the imperative operator to be
lexically ambiguous between a universal necessity reading and an existential
possibility reading.