Home Towards an enhanced semantic map for imperatives
Article
Licensed
Unlicensed Requires Authentication

Towards an enhanced semantic map for imperatives

  • Axel Holvoet EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: November 29, 2023

Abstract

This article is a contribution to the semantic map of imperatives, prompted by an implicational map proposed earlier in the literature. The tentative semantic map proposed here abstracts away from differences in use that can be attributed to pragmatics, like distinctions between commands, requests, suggestions etc. The functional differentiation resulting from person and number value, which determines a different character of the directive speech act, is adopted as the basis for the characterization of polysemy in imperatives, and taken as the nucleus of the semantic map, which is then expanded by taking into account non-directive meanings, which are also differentiated with regard to the person value from which they develop.


Corresponding author: Axel Holvoet, Institute for the Languages and Cultures of the Baltic, Vilnius University, 5, Universiteto st., Vilnius 01513, Lithuania, E-mail:

Abbreviations

1

1st person

2

2nd person

3

3rd person

acc

accusative

ad

addressee

auth

authorizer

dat

dative

def

definite

del

delative

excl

exclusive

expl

expletive

f

feminine

fut

future

gen

genitive

hort

hortative

imp

imperative

incl

inclusive

indf

indefinite

inf

infinitive

irr

irrealis

juss

jussive

lform

the l-form, a morphome underlying past tense, irrealis and sometimes future tense in Slavonic

loc

locative

m

masculine

n

neuter

neg

negation

nom

nominative

pl

plural

prf

perfect

prs

present

pst

past

ptc

particle

q

question marker

rfl

reflexive

sbjv

subjunctive

sg

singular

sp

speaker

voc

vocative

Sources

T. Macci Plauti Comoediae, ed. W. M. Lindsay. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963.

P. Ovidi Nasonis Metamorphoses, ed. R. J. Tarrant. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004.

C. Valerii Catulli Carmina, ed. R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958.

Electronic sources

CCLL – Corpus of the Contemporary Lithuanian Language at http://tekstynas.vdu.lt.

NB – Slovenian language corpus Nova Beseda at http://bos.zrc-sazu.si/s_beseda3.html.

NCPL – National Corpus of the Polish Language at http://nkjp.pl.

References

Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. 2010. Imperatives and commands. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Search in Google Scholar

Bolinger, Dwight. 1977. Meaning and form. London: Longman.Search in Google Scholar

Bravo, Ana. 2017. Rhetorical imperatives. Reasons to reasoning. In Daniël van Olmen & Simone Heinold (eds.), Imperatives and directive strategies, 79–109. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins.10.1075/slcs.184.03braSearch in Google Scholar

Culicover, Peter W. & Ray Jackendoff. 1997. Semantic subordination despite syntactic coordination. Linguistic Inquiry 28(2). 195–217.Search in Google Scholar

Ebeling, Carl. 1956. On the verbal predicate in Russian. In Morris Halle (ed.), For Roman Jakobson. Essays on the occasion of his 60th birthday, 83–90. The Hague: Mouton.Search in Google Scholar

Fortuin, Egbert. 2000. Polysemy or monosemy: Interpretation of the imperative and the dative-infinitive construction in Russian. Amsterdam: Institute for Logic, Language and Computation.Search in Google Scholar

Friedman, Victor A. 2012. Language contact. In Robert I. Binnick (ed.), The Oxford handbook of tense and aspect, 398–427. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Search in Google Scholar

Gesenius, Wilhelm & Emil Kautzsch. 1909. Wilhelm Gesenius’ Hebräische Grammatik, völlig umgearbeitet von E. Kautzsch, 28th edn. Leipzig: Verlag von F. C. W. Vogel.Search in Google Scholar

Gronas, Mikhail. 2006. The origin of the Russian historical imperative. Russian Linguistics 30(1). 89–101. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11185-006-0693-7.Search in Google Scholar

Han, Chung-hye. 2012. Imperatives. In Claus von Heusinger, Claudia Maienborn & Paul Portner (eds.), Semantics. An international handbook of natural language meaning, vol. 2, 1785–1804. Berlin-Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.Search in Google Scholar

Holvoet, Axel. 2018a. Sources for historical imperatives. Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 50(1). 36–51. https://doi.org/10.1080/03740463.2018.1432205.Search in Google Scholar

Holvoet, Axel. 2018b. Epistemic modality, evidentiality, quotativity and echoic use. In Zlatka Guentchéva (ed.), Epistemic modalities and evidentiality in cross-linguistic perspective, 242–258. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.10.1515/9783110572261-011Search in Google Scholar

Holvoet, Axel. 2020. Sources and pathways for non-directive imperatives. Linguistics 58(2). 333–362. https://doi.org/10.1515/ling-2020-0043.Search in Google Scholar

Holvoet, Axel & Jelena Konickaja. 2011. Interpretive deontics. A definition and a semantic map based on Slavonic and Baltic data. Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 43(1). 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/03740463.2011.582765.Search in Google Scholar

Huddleston, Rodney. 1994. The contrast between interrogatives and questions. Journal of Linguistics 30(2). 411–439. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0022226700016704.Search in Google Scholar

Isačenko, Aleksandr V. 1960. Grammatičeskij stroj russkogo jazyka v sopostavlenii s slovackim. Morfologija [The grammatical structure of Russian compared to Slovak]. ii. Bratislava: Izdatel’stvo slovackoj akademii nauk.Search in Google Scholar

Jakobson, Roman. 1931. Zur Struktur des russischen Verbums. In Roman Jakobson (ed.), Selected writings ii, 3–15. The Hague: Mouton.Search in Google Scholar

Jary, Mark & Mikhail Kissine. 2016. When terminology matters: The imperative as a comparative concept. Linguistics 54(1). 119–148. https://doi.org/10.1515/ling-2015-0039.Search in Google Scholar

Langacker, Ronald. 2000. Subjectification. Cognitive Linguistics 1(1). 5–38. https://doi.org/10.1515/cogl.1990.1.1.5.Search in Google Scholar

Leskien, August. 1919. Grammatik der altbulgarischen (altkirchenslavischen) Sprache. 2. und 3. Carl Winter: Aufl. Heidelberg.Search in Google Scholar

Leslau, Wolf. 1995. Reference grammar of Amharic. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.10.1515/9783110114263.1.8.875Search in Google Scholar

Lipiński, Edward. 1997. Semitic languages. Outline of a comparative grammar. Leuven: Peters.Search in Google Scholar

Palmer, Frank R. 1986. Mood and modality, 1st edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Search in Google Scholar

Palva, Heikki. 1977. The descriptive imperative of narrative style in spoken Arabic. Folia Orientalia 18. 5–26.Search in Google Scholar

Péteri, Attila. 2021. The Hungarian imperative particle hadd: A contrastive look at the development of analogous markers of sentence mood in some European languages. Acta Linguistica Hungarica 59(4). 439–463. https://doi.org/10.1556/aling.59.2012.4.3.Search in Google Scholar

Portner, Paul. 2007. Imperatives and modals. Natural Language Semantics 15(4). 351–383. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-007-9022-y.Search in Google Scholar

Proeme, Henk. 1984. Over de Nederlandse imperativus [On the Dutch imperative]. Forum der Letteren 25(4). 241–258.Search in Google Scholar

Sperber, Dan & Deirdre Wilson. 1986. Relevance: Communication and cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Search in Google Scholar

Spitzer, Leo. 1918. Aufsätze zur romanischen Syntax und Stilistik. Halle: Max Niemeyer.Search in Google Scholar

Šynkaruk, Oleh. 2019. Sponukal’ne značennja imperatyva v ukrajins’kij movi [Hortative meanings of the imperative in Ukrainian]. Slavistika 23(1). 104–118.Search in Google Scholar

Takahashi, Hidemitsu. 2012. A cognitive linguistic analysis of the English imperative: With special reference to Japanese imperatives. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins.10.1075/hcp.35Search in Google Scholar

van der Auwera, Johan. 2006. Imperatives. In Keith Brown (ed.), Encyclopedia of language and linguistics, 565–567. Amsterdam: Elsevier.10.1016/B0-08-044854-2/00264-9Search in Google Scholar

van der Auwera, Johan, Nina Dobrushina & Valentin Goussev. 2004. A semantic map for imperatives-hortatives. In Dominique Willems, Bart Defrancq, Timothy Colleman & Dirk Noël (eds.), Contrastive analysis in language. Identifying linguistic units of comparison, 44–66. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.10.1057/9780230524637_3Search in Google Scholar

von Fintel, Kai & Sabine Iatridou. 2017. A modest proposal for the meaning of imperatives. In Ana Arregui, María Luisa Rivero & Andrés Salanova (eds.), Modality across syntactic categories, 288–319. Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198718208.003.0013Search in Google Scholar

Woodcock, E. C. 1959. A new Latin syntax. London: Methuen.Search in Google Scholar

Published Online: 2023-11-29
Published in Print: 2023-11-27

© 2023 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Downloaded on 22.11.2025 from https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/stuf-2023-2017/html
Scroll to top button