Lewis' imperatives of right

One More Step and You’ll get Pseudo-Imperatives Right

Abstract We consider pseudo-imperatives like Come near (and) I’ll show you, which have a conditional interpretation (‘if you come near, I’ll show you’). We show that they have basically the same semantics as Sufficiency Modal Constructions studied by von Fintel and Iatridou (2007). We provide a detailed analysis of ‘sufficiency’ in Lewis’s counterfactual framework, extending the analysis to pse...

Development Imperatives

The objectives of the project are 1) to enhance the capability of civil society organizations in economic policy advocacy work, and 2) to pursue specific policy reform agenda based on the needs of the sector. In the last three years, in each of the sub-sector, the project is implemented through the MultiStakeholders’ Team (MST) which consists of a key NGO partner, a subject specialist (technica...

Conditionalized Imperatives

Before talking about conditionalized imperatives, I want to ensure a common understanding of ‘imperative’, namely as a clause type in the sense of Sadock and Zwicky (1985). That means that for a given language L , imperative will be taken to denote one of L ’s form types at sentence level, namely the one tokens of which are prototypically used for REQUESTs or COMMANDs. As such they are parallel...

Deontic Modality of Imperatives

The Meaning of Imperatives†

This article surveys a range of current views on the semantics of imperatives, presenting them as more or less conservative with respect to the Truth-Conditional Paradigm in semantics. It describes and critiques views at either extreme of this spectrum: accounts on which the meaning of an imperative is a modal truth-condition, as well as various accounts that attempt to explain imperative meani...