Imperatives in a dynamic pragmatics

Abstract

I offer a semantics and dynamic pragmatics for imperative grammatical mood. The semantic content of an imperative clause is its realization conditions. These take the form of a de se property, indexed to the addressee, which involves a circumstantial, futurate modal, interpreted relative to a contextually-given Kratzerian Modal Base and Ordering Source. Second person indexicality facilitates a novel account of the semantic contributions of overt imperative subjects, as in nobody move!.

The often-attested deontic flavor of imperative modality is not semantic, nor is directive force itself. Rather, these arise from the canonical pragmatic role of imperatives: updating a distinguished body of shared information G in the context of utterance. Unlike the Common Ground—consisting of propositions which the interlocutors (purport to) believe, and the QUD—the questions which they are committed to resolving, G consists of the publicly evident goals of the interlocutors, organized to reflect their plans and priorities. G is updated by and influences the understood meaning_nn of an imperative utterance, including how its Modal Base and Ordering Source are derived.

Thus, the account shares central features with the most prominent formal theories of imperative semantics (especially Charlow’s use of plans, Kaufmann’s modality, and Portner’s dynamic pragmatics), but affords superior empirical adequacy and differs from all in the way that it distinguishes semantic from pragmatic features of imperative utterances. I also argue that this approach is conceptually superior, helping to capture long-observed intuitions about the relations between indicative, interrogative and imperative moods, and their relations to the attitudes of the agents who wield them.

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