Exercise 2 Imperatives
This exercise draws upon the (admittedly incomplete) hypothesis developed in the last exercise. It involves structures like the following, known as imperatives.
(1) Close the door!
(2) Eat dirt!
(3) Know yourself!
The interesting thing about these examples is that they appear to have something missing. Compare these sentences to the following ones:
(4) Frieda closed the door.
(5) Kane ate dirt.
Traditionally, these sentences are said to have missing subjects (this is a notion we'll come back to).
There are, on the face of it, two obvious ways to think about these examples:
• Hypothesis A: imperatives are just like other sentences, and have a subject but this subject is just not pronounced.
• Hypothesis B: imperatives are not full sentences. They really don't have a subject at all.
Part A Look at the following sentences:
(6) Keep yourself clean!
(7) Look after yourself!
Task 1 Assume that the Reflexive Generalization from the preceding exercise is correct (although we know it's not the whole story). Now do the data in (6) and (7) suggest the correctness of Hypothesis A?
Task 2 Provide some more examples, along the lines of (6) and (7). Which support your answer. This is extremely easy, but will get you into the habit of finding relevant examples, a useful skill in syntactic argumentation.
Part B
Look at the following sentences:
(8) *Keep myself clean!
(9) *Look after herself!
Task 3 Do this data back up the conclusion you reached in Task 1, or do they contradict it. Explain your answer.
Task 4 Provide further examples that make the same point.
Task 5 These data not only suggest that there is an unpronounced subject in these imperatives, but also suggest what that unpronounced subject is. Say what you think it is, and why.
Part C
Of course it is possible to maintain Hypothesis B and deal with the data we have seen here. What we need to do is adopt an extra hypothesis:
• Extra hypothesis: only second-person reflexives are allowed in an imperative.
What we now have is a choice between two grammars: Grammar A adopts Hypothesis A. while Grammar B adopts Hypothesis B plus the Extra hypo-thesis. Notice that both grammars get the data right. Grammar A says there is a pronominal subject in imperatives with the right 0-features to allow only a second-person reflexive in the imperative. Grammar B says that there is no sub¬ject at all in imperatives, and that, independently, only second-person reflexives are allowed in imperatives.
These strucrates are called tag-questions, because they involve a simple sentence, with an extra ‘tag' on the end. The generalization we can make about these structures is roughly as follows:
Tag Question Generalization: The tag in a tag question is constructed from the auxiliary of the main sentence, which is negated if the main sentence, which is positive, and which is positive if the main sentence is negative, followed by a pronoun which has the same ø-features as the subject.
Given this generalization, construct an argument from the following data for hypothesis A or hypothesis B:
(13) Close the door, won't you!
(14) *Close the door, won't he!