A Constructional Approach To Conditional Imperatives

This thesis investigates conditional imperatives which take the form:imperative+ and/or+ declarative. The conjuncts are syntactically coordinate, but semantically, the first conjunct is subordinate since it can be interpreted as conditionals. A temporal iconicity can be found between the conjuncts. Although the first clause has an imperative form and an overt second person subject, it does not allow do-emphasis or don’t insertion, as genuine imperatives do,. The imperative clauses are related to speaker’s intention, liable to both desirable and undesirable interpretations. The declaratives are related to the hearer’s interests causing desirable benefits or undesirable damages. And-conditional imperatives (IaDs) have a consistent epistemic attitude (both desirable and undesirable to the two conversationalists). While or-conditional imperatives (IoDs) have an inconsistent epistemic attitude. The speaker induces the hearer to effectively carry out his/her order by uttering declaratives with a hearer-advantageous or disadvantageous content, both clauses have the second person pronoun as subject. These suggest that the speaker has shown concerns to the hearer and those sentences are intersubjective.Based on those semantic, syntactic and pragmatic features, those conditional imperatives can be classified into three subcategories:Type Ⅰ IaDs with a desirable attitude for both conversationalists; Type Ⅱ IaDs with an undesirable attitude for both conversationalists; IoDs with desirable attitude of the speaker and undesirable attitude of the hearer. Conditional imperatives differ from imperatives in that they involve the hearer’s interests in the conversation, and are thus more effective than imperatives in terms of making the hearer follow the speaker’s order. Conditional imperatives are not derived from if conditionals though they share some pragmatic promoted features. Conditional imperatives are similar to left-subordinating and construction. They differ in that the latter contains no imperative force, and they are used for different purposes. In accordance with Goldberg (1995), conditional imperatives qualify themselves as a construction.From an observer’s perspective, differences can be found between the speaker’s meaning, the interpretation of the hearer and the interpretation of the reader. The speaker expresses an imperative meaning and an intersubjective meaning (appealing for involvement), while the hearer reacts to the involvement invitation and interprets the speaker’s inducement and intention as a conditional. Since the reader shares the view point with the hearer, he/she will firstly get the conditional interpretation and then the imperative meaning.Connective and and or are normal connectives, but they have a pragmatic function of marking the epistemic attitudes of the conversationalists. Potential negative interpretation of IoDs exists in the classification in this thesis. Although the negative interpretation of IoDs are pragmatically felicitous, it is still ruled out of the construction since on the one hand, it generates an unwillingness of sacrifice in the hearer’s interpretation, which will decrease the hearer’s motivation to follow the order. On the other hand, the speaker will lose face by uttering them. Since the potential interpretation of IoDs is ruled out, there will be pragmatic asymmetry again. To solve this, it is suggested that we change the traditional quadrangle symmetry view to the triangle symmetry view. The three subconstructions form an equilateral triangle, and each two of them may be symmetric.This thesis is divided into six parts. Chapter one is the introduction, and chapter two reviews previous studies on conditional imperatives. Chapter three presents the theoretical framework of the thesis, in which Construction Grammar and some important conceptions such as motivation, inheritance and construction coercion as well as intersubjectivity are introduced. Chapter Four describes semantic, syntactic and pragmatic characteristics of Conditional Imperative Construction and distinguishes it from other related sentence patterns as well as provides evidence for the hypothesis that it is an emergent construction. In chapter five, a comprehensive analysis of construction meaning and some meaning-related problems like syntax-semantic incongruity, pragmatic asymmetry of the target construction has been discussed. Chapter six is the conclusion.Although previous studies have provided different ways to solve those puzzles of the target construction, each of them still has some flaws and fails to give a thorough explanation of those puzzles. This study has conducted a further research to obtain a deeper understanding of the linguistic phenomenon. It is significant to translation and grammar learning and teaching of those sentences. Moreover, most studies of this topic concentrate on its syntax-semantic aspects, but this study offers a construction grammar perspective, which will give some attribution to the overall development of construction grammar and study of conditional imperatives.