Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

Abstract

Imperative sentences: Semantics and pragmatics

Mark Jary (University of Roehampton) and Mikhail Kissine (Université Libre de Bruxelles)

Imperative sentences have always been a challenge for any semantic theory grounded in the notion of truth: as utterances of imperatives sentences cannot be judged true or false, it is not clear how their meaning can be explicated in terms of truth-conditions. An alternative approach takes imperative sentences to be illocutionary-force indicating devices: imperatives are said to encode directive force and to be the only means by which directive speech acts can be performed directly. However, as we all see in the talk, this positions is problematic, both in term of the theoretical commitments it entails and in face of the observation that there are non-directive uses of imperatives.

We see the solution to the problem of imperative sentences as requiring a cognitive perspective. Consideration must be given to the type of mental representations involved in action planning. Specifically, one needs to consider how mental representations of potential courses of action differ from representations of how the world is. That said, however, we do not see a cognitive perspective as replacing either a speech-act or a formal-semantic account of imperative sentences. Rather, we see an adequate theory as consisting in three sub-theories, each of which is compatible with the other, and each providing a necessary perspective on the phenomenon. In this talk, we will give an outline of what such a theory might look like.