Topics in Imperatives

Traditional grammars typically manage to describe imperatives in just a few pages, suggesting there is not much to be said about them, nor to be learned from them. After a somewhat slow start, work on imperatives has really taken off, and many interesting properties of imperatives have now been uncovered (see van der Wurff, this volume, for an overview). Imperatives are relatively short and occur frequently in the primary data directed to children. What general properties of the target language can be fixed on the basis of imperatives? What role, if any beyond figuring out imperatives, could imperatives play in the acquisition process? Within the modular approach to constructions that characterizes modern syntax, the question arises how exactly imperatives differ from other clause types and how apparent construction-specific properties should be accounted for. This paper examines two aspects of imperative constructions in Dutch from this perspective. First, right-peripheral objects are possible in Dutch imperatives, as shown in (1). This seems to be a unique property of imperatives, since declaratives and interrogatives do not allow it (Den Dikken 1992)