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Revisiting the syntax of imperatives in Yemeni Arabic: An Agree across phases approach

Summary

The paper asks what the subject of an imperative really is. Using data from the under-studied Ibbi subdialect of Yemeni Arabic, Shormani argues for an "Agree Across Phases" (AAP) analysis within Minimalism. The true thematic subject is a null second-person pro sitting in Spec,vP. Any overt pronoun or noun before the verb ("you", "boys") is not a subject. It is an aboutness topic in the C-domain (Spec,TopP), acting as the logical subject and the discourse antecedent of pro. A Top head carrying an addressee feature [Adrs] licenses pro and fixes its interpretation. This happens through a coreference relation computed as Agree understood as Match. The relation can be local, within one clause, or non-local, across coordinated imperatives. For bare imperatives with no visible topic, a null topic is posited whose reference comes from the discourse. The account matters because it ties sentence structure to discourse and performative function. It also covers coordinated and A′-chain imperatives, which earlier treatments had not addressed.

Key points

  • Data come from Yemeni Arabic, specifically the Ibbi dialect of Ibb Governorate, which the author describes as very under-investigated.
  • Earlier proposals placed the licensor of the null subject on various heads: a tenseless INFL, an imperative-flavoured T, an imperative C, or a Jussive T. Here the licensor is Top° in the C-domain, bearing an [Adrs] feature.
  • Two kinds of A′-chain link topic and pro:
    • local chains, as in "You stop talking!" or "Boys leave!";
    • non-local chains running from the topmost topic through a null topic to pro across conjoined clauses.
  • In a coordination such as "Ali take the eraser and erase the board", repeating the topic is ruled out when the addressee stays the same. The paper attributes this to Grice's maxim of quantity, following Radford.
  • When the addressees differ ("Boys leave and girls stay!"), the second topic must be overt.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Preverbal "you" or a name in an imperative is treated as a discourse topic naming the addressee, while the actual agent is an implicit second person that the topic corefers with. — For Mova (frames): When building who-does-what frames for imperatives, fill the agent slot with an implicit addressee and link any overt "you"/vocative NP to it as coreferent, rather than treating that NP as the grammatical subject.
  • I2. Bare imperatives get a silent topic whose referent is resolved from context, so every imperative has an explicit anchor that can be tracked. — For Mova (world): Create an explicit addressee entity node for each bare command in a story, resolved from the current dialogue participants, so later questions about who was told to act can be answered traceably.
  • I3. An implicit addressee can stretch across conjoined imperatives as a non-local chain, so one overt topic covers several coordinated commands. — For Mova (frames): Coreference could propagate a single addressee across coordinated imperative clauses, and start a new addressee only when a fresh overt NP appears (e.g. "boys … and girls …").
  • I4. Whether an addressee may be repeated in coordination is governed by economy (Grice's quantity): repetition is odd unless it signals a different referent. — For Mova (back): During generation, drop a repeated addressee/subject in coordinated commands when it is unchanged, and keep it overt only when the addressee changes, to produce natural-sounding imperatives.
  • I5. The paper separates the syntactic subject from the logical or performative participant, assigning them to different layers (vP vs. C-domain). — For Mova (tree): In UD conversion and parser post-processing, a rule could flag preverbal NPs in imperatives as candidates for vocative/dislocated rather than nsubj, keeping the tree consistent with the frame layer.

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

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Topics: Discourse analysis · Coreference resolution

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.48550/arxiv.2605.08447 · arXiv 2605.08447

@misc{shormani2026revisiting,
  title = {{Revisiting the syntax of imperatives in Yemeni Arabic: An Agree across phases approach}},
  author = {Shormani, Mohammed Q.},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2605.08447},
  eprint = {2605.08447},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2605.08447}
}

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