This article examines Afrikaans V1-constructions with the verb laat ‘let’ and compares them with similar constructions in Dutch. I refer to these as pseudo-let imperatives (or PLI-constructions). Although PLI-constructions have the same form as some let-imperatives in both languages, they no longer function as commands and lack the directive force typically associated with imperatives. Instead, PLI-constructions are used to express the speaker’s perspective on a certain event or action. Drawing on grammaticalization criteria used by Van Craenenbroeck & Van Koppen (2015, 2017) in their work on perception and causative verbs in imperative(-like) constructions in Dutch, this article argues that PLI-laat/laten has undergone grammaticalization in both Afrikaans and Dutch. Additionally, I demonstrate that the Afrikaans PLI-laat has grammaticalized further than its Dutch counterpart. I propose that Afrikaans’ contact with a variety of other languages throughout its history may have accelerated the grammaticalization of laat relative to its Dutch counterpart, resulting in the observed differences in the grammaticalization of PLI-laat/laten constructions.

Does low mood have intentional content? If so, what is it? Philosophers have tried to answer both questions by appealing to low mood’s phenomenal character. However, appeals to phenomenology have not settled this debate. Thus, I take a different approach: I tackle both questions by examining low mood’s complex functional role in cognition. I argue that if we take this role into account, we have excellent reason to believe that low mood a) has content, and b) has the following indicative-imperative content: Good events are, on average, less likely to occur than bad events & Limit [the subject’s] resource expenditure!

This article examines fragment sentences and imperative clauses in carefully edited journalistic writing, specifically in editorials of The Economist. Fragments (e.g. What to do?) and imperatives (e.g. Take spending cuts as an example) share formal and functional properties, such as being shorter than canonical clauses and typically having non-truth-conditional semantics. As demonstrated in our analysis, both sentence types tend to appear prominently within a paragraph, typically at the beginning or the end. Additionally, within the entire editorial, they are often found in the second paragraph, where the writer presents a contrasting view from the opening paragraph, or in the concluding paragraph. This article argues for considering stylistic properties in the characterisation of grammatical constructions.

I apply truthmaker semantics to the logic of conditional imperatives.

This article focuses on a non-canonical use of negation in historical and modern French, characterized by an apparent absence of meaning: expletive negation. In search of the lost meaning of expletive negation, via a diachronic investigation from Latin to French, we establish that expletive negation originates from prohibitive negation. We put forward an analysis of prohibitive negation within Krifka (2014)'s model of embedded speech-act and propose that expletive negation is the continuation of prohibitive negation, and that it is what remains of a long-gone embedded negative imperative in French. Along this line of analysis, the article brings historical evidence in favour of the hypothesis that languages can develop from speech-act embedding to proposition embedding. Our analysis of prohibitive negation as a clause-typing negation marker in Latin and as a verbal mood negation marker brings new evidence to the claim that sentential and verbal mood marking are two intimately related phenomena.

This paper investigates postverbal imperative subjects (e.g., get you to school), ungrammatical in standard English but grammatical in certain contexts in dialects of Scottish and Belfast English. Henry (1995) reports that unaccusative verbs generally allow postverbal subjects in Belfast English, but in the Scottish English (ScotE) dialect considered here, only a very restricted subset of verbs allow it. Moreover, in ScotE, the preposition away can appear without an overt verb (I’ll away to my bed); this also allows a postverbal subject in imperatives (away you to school). The ScotE data cast doubt on Henry’s (1995) proposal that the licensor of postverbal subjects is weak agreement. The paper argues that the subjects in these constructions are actually external arguments of small clauses (of which goal PPs are taken to be a subset following, e.g., Beck & Snyder 2001). The differences between dialects are located in the structure of resultatives; Belfast English allows Case to be assigned to the subject of small clauses in resultative constructions via a functional head endowed with a causation feature, allowing them to remain in situ in imperatives. In standard English, the causation feature is directly merged onto the verb, not allowing for Case assignment and forcing raising of the subject of the small clause. The ScotE data is argued to arise from the availability of a very ‘light’ verb which is realized as get in some contexts and as silence in others.

This article analyzes Russian aspectual usage in the imperative by combining Šatunovskij’s (2009) approach with Dickey’s (2018) cognitive linguistic theory of Russian aspect. It argues that the contrasting use of perfective and imperfective imperatives in mands for the completion of a single action can be explained in terms of the pragmatic mechanisms proposed by Šatunovskij (2009): perfective imperatives signal a request on the part of the speaker for the listener to make the decision to carry out the action, whereas imperfective imperatives make no such signal, because the decision has already been made. The latter occurs when the speaker knows or infers that the listener has already made the decision (or will do so if given the chance), or when the speaker has suspended the listener’s decision-making role and has gone ahead and made the decision. Various contextual uses of affirmative and negated imperatives and analyzes them in terms of the request or lack thereof for the listener to make the decision to carry out the action. The functions of the perfective and imperfective aspects in imperatives are argued to be instantiations of temporal definiteness and temporal indefiniteness (respectively). Inasmuch as this is true, Russian aspect codes alternative construals of time in non-finite usage as well as finite usage.

The prescriptive infinitive can be found in the North Germanic languages, is very old, and yet is largely unnoticed and undescribed. It is used in a very limited pragmatic context of a pleasant atmosphere by adults towards very young children, or towards pets or (more rarely) adults. It has a set of syntactic properties that distinguishes it from the imperative: Negation is pre-verbal, subjects are pre-verbal, subjects are third person and are only expressed by lexical DPs, not personal pronouns. It can be found in modern child language corpora, but probably originated before ad 500. The paper is largely descriptive, but some theoretical solutions to the puzzles of this construction are proposed.

This article deals with two syntactic differences between Present-Day Swedish (PDSw) and Early Modern Swedish (EMSw): first, only EMSw allows VS and XVS word order to occur in relative clauses; second, only EMSw permits non-verb-initial imperatives. One structural difference between the varieties is assumed to be a prerequisite for all these word order differences: the subject position was spec-TP in EMSw but is spec-FinP in PDSw. Only the lower position (spec-TP) is compatible with inversion (VS) and fronting of non-subjects (XVS) in relative clauses as well as with imperative clauses having elements other than the imperative verb in the initial position. To be able to account for the latter phenomenon, however, an additional assumption is needed: the imperative type-feature, [imp], always accompanies the verb in PDSw but is tied to an operator in EMSw. The first assumption about differing subject positions is independently motivated by findings already in the previous literature. The second assumption about the differing behaviour of [imp] in the two varieties is supported by the distribution of imperative verbs over a wider range of syntactic contexts in EMSw than in PDSw.