Imperatives

Imperative clauses challenge semantic theories that, traditionally, build heavily on truth conditions and truth preservation across inferences. This chapter introduces the notion of imperatives as objects of linguistic investigation and discusses their fate in early attempts to extend the nascent standard theories of linguistic meaning from declarative clauses to non‐declaratives in general and to imperatives in particular. It then examines the relation between imperatives and the speech acts these are used to perform. A couple of developments in formal semantic theorizing that have crucially changed the game for semantic analyses of non‐declarative sentences are discussed, and a brief overview is provided of the main types of approaches that are being pursued in current theorizing. A short introduction is then given to three of the topics that are currently providing novel insights into the semantics of imperative clauses, namely embedded imperatives, related form types (so called “surrogate imperatives”), and the interaction between imperative marking and other grammatical categories.