The Syntax of Imperatives
Cambridge Studies in Linguistics Series

The imperative clause is one of three major sentence types that have been found to be universal across the languages of the world. Compared to declaratives and interrogatives, the imperative type has received diverse analyses in the literature. This cutting-edge study puts forward a new linguistic theory of imperatives, arguing that categories of the speech act, specifically Speaker and Addressee, are conceptually necessary for an adequate syntactic account. The book offers compelling empirical and descriptive evidence by surveying new typological data in critical assessment of competing hypotheses towards an indexical syntax of human language. An engaging read for students and researchers interested in linguistics, philosophy and the syntax of language.

1. Introduction; 2. Imperatives across languages; 3. Foundations for an analysis of the imperative clause; 4. The syntax of imperative clauses: a performative hypothesis; 5. Basque allocutive agreement; 6. Conclusion.

Asier Alcázar is Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of Missouri. His research interests include generative syntax and its interfaces with semantics and morphology, corpus linguistics and typology.
Mario Saltarelli is Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Southern California. He specialises in general linguistics and researches the synchronic and diachronic morphology-phonology and syntax-semantics interface.