Le sujet de l'impératif

CARMEN DOBROVIE-SORIN: The subject of the imperative. This paper considers the status of the empty subject noun phrase of the imperative in French and in Rumanian. For Rumanian the analysis draws a parallei between the cases of lexical nouns that occur in the vocative case (to the right of the verb) and the cases with a surface subject. It is shown that in Rumanian the subject of the imperative is of the same type as the subject of other inflected verbs (in Rumanian pronominal subjects are generally deleted). In French thesubject of the imperative may be (is is shown that the empty subject slot is to the right of the verb, as in Rumanian) unlike the nominative subject of other inflected verbs. This possibility is explained by a relation of quantification that binds the subject of the imperative to an «imperative quantifier» which defines the domain of reference of the subject as the set of aIl co-speakers. Our hypothesis, which is is that the subject of the imperative can only occur (as an empty slot) to the right of the verb, accounts for the difference in clitic placing between the imperative and other structures (Tu le tapes / Tape-le).