Telling Each Other What to Do: On Imperative Languag

This dissertation explores the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of imperative sentences. Chapter 1 is on the syntax of imperatives and argues that there are no substantive structural differences between imperatives and declaratives. The differentiating syntactic factor, I argue, is the presence of a unique morpheme, IMP. Chapter 2 looks at two popular and conservative theories of the semantics of imperatives, arguing that neither is adequate. Chapter 3 proposes a different theory called Naive Satisfactionism. According to Naive Satisfactionism, imperatives semantically express satisfaction conditions indexed to a time range centered on the time of utterance. Chapter 4 takes Naive Satisfactionism one step further. In it I argue that in order to solve the problem of Mixed Compound Sentences, the semantics of imperatives must be identified with the semantics of simple present tense declaratives. I call this enhanced view Strong Naive Satisfactionism. The surprising upshot is that while there is a syntactic difference between imperatives and declarative (because of IMP), there is no substantive semantic difference. Chapter 5 turns to the pragmatics of imperatives and aims to explain how imperatives function to get people to do things. Part of the explanation involves the role of 2nd-person pronouns: they function to engage agency. The other part of the explanation involves reasons: certain (but not all) directive speech acts essentially involve attempting to give someone a reason to perform the act specified by an imperative. If in using an imperative a speaker succeeds in both engaging an addressees agency and giving them a reason to perform the relevant act (i.e. to intend the imperative's satisfaction conditions), then the speaker will have succeeded in telling the addressee what to do.