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Marking clause type

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Addressing the addressee in imperativesRaffaella Zanuttini(joint work with Simon Mauck, Miok Pak and Paul Portner)Georgetown UniversityMarch 4, 2005Stony Brook1 Marking clause type at the syntax/semantics interfaceA fundamental concept in the description of language is that of clause type, a certain kind of pairingbetween sentence form and meaning (Sadock & Zwicky 1985):11. The major clause types appear to be universal: declaratives, interrogatives, and imperatives.2. They form a closed system:(a) “There are sets of corresponding sentences, the members of which differ only in belongingto different types.”(b) “T he types are mutually exclusive, no sentence being simultaneously of two differenttypes.” (S&Z 1985: 158)The clause type system is not the same as the morphosyntactic mood system, despite theirfrequent overlap in the case of imperatives.3. Their meanings represent specific illocutionary forces: assertion, requesting information, or-dering, and perhaps others. (An illocutionary act is performed in saying something, andAustin (1962) emphasizes that it is conventional, i.e. part of the meaning, broadly con-strued.)Illocutionary force and the semantics of clause type cannot be identified, though, for tworeasons: First, many illocutionary forces aren’t associated with a particular grammaticalform, e.g. promising or threatening. And second, the illocutionary force of one clause typemay be expressed by another:2(1) a. You must leave now. (declarative with the force of ordering)1This work is supported by National Science Foundation grant BCS-0234278 to Paul Portner and RaffaellaZanuttini.2This point was discussed in the generative s emantics literature (Sadock 1971, McCawley 1973).1b. Aren’t you the cutest thing? (interrogative with the force of exclaiming)c. Please tell me w hen the plane is leaving. (imperative with the force of asking)We distinguish the illoc utionary force of a clause from its grammatically encoded function. Welabel the force conventionally associated with a sentence’s form its sentential force, followingChierchia & McConnell-Ginet (1990).Despite the fact that it is basic to how we talk about language, a more detailed study of this conceptis required for a number of reasons. On a descriptive level, the boundaries between the differenttypes are hard to define precisely. On a more theoretical one, there are several questions that needto be addressed:1. Why are individual types marked in the way they are? (Examples: questions with inversionor with sentence-final particles; declaratives with basic word order or particles; etc.). Doesthe form reflect the way in which the meaning is composed?2. For each clause type, is there a pattern to how it gets marked across languages?33. For each language, is there a pattern to how it marks its clause types?4. Why are certain meanings represented within this system, but others not? (The question isparallel to that pursued in Generalized Quantifier Theory of why certain quantifiers exist butothers don’t.)In the context of studying imperatives, a number of scholars have addressed the question of howclause types are marked in the syntax (Rivero & Terzi (1995), Han (1998), among others). In manylanguages, the core cases of imperatives show verb movement to C (as in 2a). It has been suggestedthat the trigger for this movement is a syntactic encoding of imperative force. However, there areexamples which unambiguously have the sentential force of imperatives and yet do not show suchmovement (as in 2b).(2) a. Telefonale!call.imp-her(Italian)‘Call her!’3Many have had the intuition that the CP level of structure is involved in representing specific clause types. Forinstance: the sentence-initial Q morpheme of Katz & Postal (1964) and Baker (1970), the imperative morpheme ofRivero & Terzi (1994), and the presence of sentence-final particles in Korean:(i) Na-nunI-TOPcemsim-ullunch-ACCmek-ess-ta.eat-PAST-DEC(declarative) (Korean)‘I ate lunch.’(ii) Nu-nunyou.sg-TOPcemsim-ullunch-ACCmek-ess-ni?eat-PAST-Q(question)‘Did you eat lunch?’(iii) Cemsim-(ul)lunch-(ACC)meke-la!eat-IMP(imperative)‘Eat lunch!’2b. Nonneglehertelefonare!call.inf‘Don’t call her!’Thus, this approach fails to provide an account which ties together all and only the cases showingimperative sentential force. (They do, we note, properly single out the cases which are identifiedas imperative via their morphology, but this is not sufficient for our purposes.)Our approach s eparates the question of how clauses are typed from that of how force is encoded.We propose that:1. Sentential force per se is not formally represented.2. Clause types are marked in the syntax by encoding primitive components of thetype’s semantics.1.1 ExclamativesWe have already applied our approach to the case of exclamatives (Zanuttini and Portner (2003)).We have argued that all exclamative forms share two abstract syntactic properties: a wh operatorand a factive operator. These properties encode the essential semantic components which togetheryield the meaning of an exclamative: factivity and widening. The role of factivity is straightforward:It introduces a presupposition that the propositional content of the exclamative is true. In termsof 3, this informally means that it is presupposed that he eats something:(3) a. Chewhatrobastuffchethatmangia!eats(Italian)‘The things he eats!’b. The things he eats!The role of widening is to expand the domain of quantification for the wh operator:4(4) a. Widening: For any clause S marked by Rwidening, widen the initial domain of quan-tification for Rwidening, D1, to a new domain, D2, such that [[ S]]D− [[ S]]D6= ∅.b. [[ S]]D1= { p1, p2, p3}c. [[ S]]D2= { p1, p2, p3, p5}We have argued that having a w h operator and a factive operator is sufficient to identify a sentenceas an exclamative. Force may or may not be encoded, but in either case other syntactic/semanticfeatures suffice to type the clause.4This concept of widening is related to that used by Kadmon & Landman (1993) in the analysis of any.31.2 ImperativesWe are now applying the same approach to the study of imperatives. The first step is to identifythe primitive components of the meaning of this clause type.The function of an imperative is to add a requirement to the set of requirements held by thehearer (what we’ll call the “to do list”, cf. Lewis (1979)’s permitted worlds, parallel to the commonground or Ginzburg’s (1995a; 1995b), ‘QUD


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