Chapter published in:
Imperatives and Directive Strategies
Edited by Daniël Van Olmen and Simone Heinold
[Studies in Language Companion Series 184] 2017
► pp. 79–110

Rhetorical imperatives

Reasons to reasoning

| University of Murcia

Rhetorical imperatives are formal imperatives that convey an assertion of the opposite polarity. As assertions, they can be judged to be true or false. As morphological imperatives, they reject embedding and have verb-subject word order. Rhetorical imperatives involve a widening of the domain operator, responsible both for the generic interpretation of the subject pronoun tú ‘you (singular)’ and for the licensing of negative polarity items. A speaker uses a rhetorical imperative to make the addressee aware of the impossibility of putting into action the content of p. This supports the theories that analyze imperatives as inherently conveying directive force. Finally, it is argued that rhetorical imperatives may result from the grammaticalization of a non-directive imperative-like conditional.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The syntax and the semantics of regular imperatives
    • 2.1Grammatical properties
    • 2.2Semantic properties
    • 2.3On the relationship between imperatives and modals
  • 3.Grammatical properties of RIs
    • 3.1The subject
    • 3.2The verb
    • 3.3Negative polarity items
    • 3.4RIs and regular imperatives
  • 4.Semantic properties of RIs
    • 4.1Assertoric potential and polarity
    • 4.2Some consequences of being assertions (and not commands)
    • 4.3The absence of directivity
    • 4.4RIs as reasons for reasoning
    • 4.5RIs as modalized assertions
  • 5.RIs as a widening of the domain operation
    • 5.1The widening of the domain operation
    • 5.2On the reference of the subject pronoun
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Abbreviations
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 11 April 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.184.03bra
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