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Imperatives in a dynamic pragmatics

Paper · 2023 · Craige Roberts

Summary

The paper builds a theory of what English imperative clauses mean and how using them changes a conversation. Roberts treats the content of an imperative as its realization conditions. This is a de se property tied to the addressee. It contains a circumstantial, future-oriented modal, and context supplies its Modal Base and Ordering Source in Kratzer's sense. Neither directive force nor the usual deontic "should" flavor belongs to this content. Both arise in pragmatics. An imperative's typical job is to update G, a shared public record of the interlocutors' goals ordered by their plans and priorities. G sits alongside the Common Ground (shared beliefs) and the QUD (open questions). The work is theoretical. It first sets up empirical desiderata and uses them to score the accounts of Kaufmann and Portner. It then shows that the new proposal meets them, extends it to overt subjects such as nobody move!, and compares it with Charlow, Starr and Krifka. The payoff is one picture linking three moods to three attitudes: declaratives to belief, interrogatives to inquiry, imperatives to intention.

Key points

  • The three moods differ in semantic type. Declaratives denote propositions ⟨s,t⟩, interrogatives denote sets of propositions, and imperatives denote addressee-indexed properties ⟨s,⟨e,t⟩⟩. The Force Linking Principle (Portner 2004; Zanuttini, Pak & Portner 2012) connects each type to its default speech act.
  • Table 1 is a scoreboard comparing two existing accounts against desiderata:
    • Kaufmann: imperatives are propositions with a semantic deontic modal, and there is no dynamic pragmatics.
    • Portner: imperatives are indexed properties with no modal, the deontic flavor is pragmatic, and dynamic pragmatics is used.
    • Desiderata: imperatives are not true or false, cannot serve as conditional antecedents, can appear in conditional imperatives, show a range of modal flavors, are futurate, and interact with negation in scope.
  • The paper gives two arguments against putting illocutionary force in LF:
    • Embedded imperatives, as in John said eat his share of the chicken, issue no directive.
    • In every mood, disjunction scopes below force.
  • Overt imperative subjects such as nobody are handled through second-person indexicality, which changes the realization conditions.
  • Mixed-force and/or chains can stretch across several utterances. Every part must address one shared decision problem, so coherence constrains these chains rather than a Boolean semantics.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Context is split into three registers: facts (CG), open questions (QUD), and public goals and plans (G). Each mood updates a different one.
  • I2. Clause content stays force-neutral, and context assigns directive force. An imperative embedded under "say" is therefore reported content, not a command to the reader.
  • I3. Questions and imperatives are derived from a declarative core by abstraction. Abstracting over polarity or a wh-element yields a question; abstracting over the indexical subject yields an imperative.
  • I4. Coordinated or disjoined directives and assertions are read as alternative or continued plans answering one decision problem. A discourse "or" can mark an alternative to an entire multi-sentence plan.
  • I5. Rival theories are evaluated against an explicit table of empirical desiderata, and each theory's failures are listed per phenomenon.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (world): Add a per-participant goal/plan store next to the fact store. Directives in a tale then become pending intentions that later events can satisfy or violate.
  • I2 (frames): The speech-act layer should decide force from the clause's syntactic and discourse position. Imperatives under verbs of saying should be marked as reported directives held by the quoted agent.
  • I3 (back): One frame can be generated as a statement, a yes/no or wh-question, or a command through a single explainable abstraction step, instead of separate templates.
  • I4 (frames): Treat sentence-initial "Or"/"And" in dialogue as plan-level connectives grouping utterances into alternative plans. Flag them as incoherent when the parts do not target a shared problem.
  • I5 (learn): Keep a phenomenon scoreboard for imperatives, covering embedded, conditional, negated, overt-subject and mixed-force cases. Use it as a regression and negative-control suite when changing the speech-act module.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓The Ohio State UniversityColumbus · United States82 works · 18,502 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 16,667 worksArtificial Intelligence · 16,194 worksArts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 2,263 works

Cite

Cite as Craige Roberts. 2023. Imperatives in a dynamic pragmatics. Semantics and Pragmatics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.3765/sp.16.7

@article{roberts2023imperatives,
  title = {{Imperatives in a dynamic pragmatics}},
  author = {Craige Roberts},
  journal = {Semantics and Pragmatics},
  year = {2023},
  doi = {10.3765/sp.16.7},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.16.7}
}

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