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 paralleled by declaratives (used for ASSERTIONs), interrogatives (for informationseeking QUESTIONs) and for some languages also exclamatives and perhaps more. A natural choice for explaining this clause type system is to assume that it is encoded semantically, in the sense that the semantic object assigned to a particular sentence level form determines its prototypical usage. The actual speech act performed by uttering a token of that type is then determined by the interaction of the semantic object expressed with the context of utterance. Imperatives are wellknown to pose problems for a semantic treatment because they lack a straightforward link to both the anchor of static and dynamic semantics, namely the concepts of truth/falsity and of information growth. In that, they differ from interrogatives that have been linked quite successfully to both via the concept of answerhood. On the other hand, the speech act types associated with imperatives vary too widely in order to associate them in a straightforward way with a speech act (understood as a semantic element) or an alternative update type (as it can be proposed in a dynamic framework, cf. eg. Zarnic (2002), Mastop (2005)). This unclear and most likely non-propositional status is of course most problematic when it comes to (compositional) integration of imperatives into larger compounds, something which is very rare indeed. For example, very few languages allow for imperatives to occurr in indirect speech (cf. Schwager (2005b) for discussion). One of the very few complex sentence types in which (cross-linguistically) imperatives occur quite naturally are conditionals: