Overview

The imperative clause is one of three major sentence types that have been found to be universal across the languages of the world. Compared to declaratives and interrogatives, the imperative type has received diverse analyses in the literature. This cutting-edge study puts forward a new linguistic theory of imperatives, arguing that categories of the speech act, specifically Speaker and Addressee, are conceptually necessary for an adequate syntactic account. The book offers compelling empirical and descriptive evidence by surveying new typological data in critical assessment of competing hypotheses towards an indexical syntax of human language. An engaging read for students and researchers interested in linguistics, philosophy and the syntax of language.

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9781009342445

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'This book opens a so far unexplored space: the context-sensitivity of narrow syntax. It successfully shows that the syntactic formalization of notions such as Speaker and Addressee are necessary to provide a deeper understanding of the nature of grammar. The authors draw a fascinating picture of how a syntactic theory can incorporate and represent indexicality.' Alessandra Giorgi, Ca' Foscari University, Italy

Author Information

Asier Alcázar is Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of Missouri. His research interests include generative syntax and its interfaces with semantics and morphology, corpus linguistics and typology. Mario Saltarelli is Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Southern California. He specialises in general linguistics and researches the synchronic and diachronic morphology-phonology and syntax-semantics interface.

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