Utility and implicatures of imperatives

The article defines the relevance or utility of an imperative in terms of how far it can help in increasing the probability of the occurrence of a desirable future world. In terms of this notion, we account for (i) the potential of imperatives to license free choice any in their scope; and (ii) the free choice effects of disjunctive and any-imperatives. 1 Choice-offering imperatives 1.1 Or in imperatives It is a well known fact that or in imperatives can give rise to a free choice effect, see (Ross, 1941; Åquist, 1965; Hamblin, 1987) and more recently (Aloni, 2003). (1) Do x or y! ⇒ You may do x and you may do y! As an illustration of (1), consider the following example: (2) SMITH: Take her to Knightsbridge or Bond Street! JONES STARTS TO LEAVE. SMITH: (?) Don’t you dare take her to Bond Street! Intuitively the most natural interpretation of Smith’s first imperative is as one presenting a choice between two different actions. Smith’s subsequent imperative can be regarded as negating this choice, and, therefore, strikes us as out of place here. The free choice inference in (1), however, is not always warranted as illustrated by the following example from Rescher and Robison (1964): (3) TEACHER: John, stop that foolishness or leave the room! JOHN STARTS TO LEAVE. TEACHER: Don’t you dare leave this room! Examples like (3) suggest to treat free choice effects as pragmatic implicatures, rather than semantic entailments. In the classical literature (notably (Åquist, 1965)), examples like (3) has been presented as evidence in favor of an ambiguity between choice-offering and alternative-presenting disjunctive imperatives. On a pragmatic approach, the failure of the free choice inference in example (3) can be explained as an implicature cancelation without multiplying the senses of imperative sentences. A further indication that free choice effects of disjunctive imperatives are conversational implicatures is the fact that they disappear in negative environments (e.g. Gazdar 1979). (4) Don’t post this letter or burn it! If free choice inferences had the status of logical entailment, then (4) could be used in a situation in which one wants the letter to be posted or burnt, but doesn’t want to leave the choice to the hearer. This is clearly not so. 1.2 Any in imperatives Another example of a ‘choice-offering’ imperative is (5) with an occurrence of free choice any which is licensed in this context.