Division of Labor between Semantics and Pragmatics of Canonical and Non-canonical Imperatives

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  • 典型的命令文と非典型的命令文の意味論・語用論とその棲み分け

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<p>Recent work on imperatives has explored what enables sentences to convey the directive meaning. The “minimal” theories assume an imperative-oriented pragmatic content (e.g., Portner 2004, 2007, von Fintel and Iatridou 2017, among others), which does the heavy lifting that is required to convey the meaning. The “modal” theories, in contrast, assume that it is a semantic modal that derives the diverse interpretations of imperatives (e.g., Han 2000, Kaufmann 2012, Condoravdi and Lauer 2012, 2017, among others). This paper addresses this controversy and proposes a division of labor between the contributions of semantic and pragmatic meanings of imperatives, focusing on the two different types of imperatives in Japanese. I conclude that the process by which the directive meaning is generated differs depending on the components that each type encodes. The resulting account eliminates the competition between the minimal and modal theories, by synthesizing the underlying ideas behind them. It also sheds light on the different ways in which sentence ‘forms’ interact with sentence ‘types’ and contexts to modify the illocutionary force of an utterance.</p>

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