Abstract
The interpretation of imperative clauses as expressing necessity of particular modal flavors accounts well for all uses of imperatives that serve to constrain the future courses of events. This chapter explores imperatives that, at first glance, are at odds with this, as they serve to widen the space for possible action (permissions) or offer exemplary solutions for the addressee’s goals (for example-advice). It is argued that the two phenomena have to be dealt with at different levels of the grammar: permissions are derived from the interaction of the necessity proposition with particular contextual settings, while for example-advice requires a decomposition of the necessity operator into a possibility operator and a covert exhaustifier that can be replaced by an overt ‘for example’-adverbial. The chapter offers a brief discussion of free choice items that may at first glance seem problematic for the pragmatic treatment of permissions. It is shown that imperatives and overt possibility operators behave sufficiently differently to stick with an analysis of imperatives as, in the absence of ‘for example’, expressing exhaustified possibility, i.e. necessity.
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- 1.
Billy Strayhorn/via Sæbø (2002).
- 2.
Example from {Hamblin
- 3.
- 4.
Portner (2007) mentions conversational implicatures. Davis (2009) claims that permission effects arise where the addressee’s action alternatives get constrained to those that she already plans to act out anyway. This does not strike me as adequate, as imperative permissions are given typically in contexts where the addressee would not dare to act out the prejacent in the absence of the imperative utterance that signals the speaker’s acquiescence or even approval.
- 5.
I will not discuss his approach in detail as the most interesting differences arise from his general approach to imperatives. For a discussion of Portner’s analysis of imperatives, see Section 2.2.4.
- 6.
For a similar view see Portner (2010), who claims that ‘permission imperatives are severely restricted, and only come about in specific constructions and contexts’ (p. 10).
- 7.
None of these particles occurs exclusively in Permissions. In contrast to the more liberal nur and einfach, ruhig is limited to speech act types that somehow encourage or mark as possible the action alternative described by the prejacent. Schwager (2010) argues that this is best captured at this pragmatic level and should not be tied to co-occurrence with a possibility operator. Evidence in favor of this assumption comes from the occurrence of ruhig in declaratives that do not contain modal operators. Cf. Schwager (2010) for details. A similar idea is to be found in Portner (2010).
- 8.
On closer inspection, if you like-antecedents pose problems in their own right: even when occurring with overtly expressed permissions as in (i), the permission issued is not felt to depend on the addressee having a wish for what has been permitted.
(i)
You may come earlier if you like.
Just imagine a scenario where the addressee did not have a wish to come earlier, but ended up doing so, for example because his taxi driver did not respect the speed limit. It doesn’t seem that he could be blamed by the speaker for having done something that was prohibited.
Moreover, consider the following data from German. In the given context, the modal dürfen can only expresses deontic possibility. Now, an exchange like (ii) is a typical joke (A need not reply):
(ii)
A: Wenn
du
willst,
darfst
du
heute
länger
aufbleiben.
- B: Und
wenn
ich
nicht
mag?
if
you
like,
may
you
today
longer
stay-up
and
if
I
not
like
‘A: If you like, you can stay up longer today. - B: And what if I don’t want to?’
The fact that B’s reply sounds like a joke (or a misunderstanding) indicates that the consequent does not depend on the antecedent. Also, the proposition expressed (elliptically) by the antecedent constitutes one of Searle’s preparatory conditions for Permissions. Therefore, pragmatically, (ii)-A looks a lot like a relevance conditional. Yet, syntactically, the examples with if you like-modifiers differ from relevance conditionals: the consequent can be preceded by dann ‘then’, but it can’t be transformed into a V2-clause. Both properties are typically taken as evidence that the example in question is not a relevance conditional (cf. Bhatt and Pancheva, 2006 and Section 6.2). A solution to these problems has to await future research. As far as I can tell, the discussion of anankastic conditionals (cf. e.g. Sæbø, 2002,von Fintel and Iatridou, 2005) provides the most promising starting point.
- 9.
For the moment, I confine my explanation to simple cases where any further wishes of the addressee are compatible with each other and both with taking an apple and with pleasing the speaker. Potential further wishes of the addressee will thus not affect the status of these two propositions with respect to the set of addressee bouletically optimal worlds and can be ignored safely.
- 10.
I am indebted to Dennis Bonnay (p.c.) for pointing out the second possibility. In general, the difference between what is allowed and what is known to be allowed is often ignored in the literature, see also the discussion in Section 2.1.1. The contrast carries over to questions:
(i)
a.
Darf
ich
mir
einen
Apfel
nehmen?
Bitte!
may
I
me
an
apple
take?
please!
‘Can I take an apple? Please!’
b.
Darf
ich
mir
eigentlich
einen
Apfel
nehmen?
may
I
me
DPrt
an
apple
take
‘Am I allowed to take an apple?’
Note that the interrogative in (ia) asks the addressee to change the deontic status of the prejacent if it isn’t already permissible, while (ib) simply investigates the prejacent’s current status.
- 11.
If the speaker was known to be angry with the addressee anyway, the reasoning wouldn’t make much sense. Likewise, if taking an apple is assumed to be impossible, permitting or prohibiting it does not make much sense.
- 12.
For these examples it is not entirely clear how the quantifier and the necessity operator should be assumed to scope with respect to each other; see Section 2.2.1 for discussion.
- 13.
Subtrigging also offers a possible way to account for the Permission-like readings discussed in Section 5.2.1. As I argued in Section 5.1.1 above, imperatives felt to convey Permissions (in that they change the status of an action from prohibited to allowed) are strictly speaking always slightly stronger than just that (due to the ordering source restriction). Thus, it could be that both (15a) and (12) render taking a flower permissible, but that (12) carries that additional pragmatic flavor of speaker endorsement that is inherent in imperatives in general. As the Permission-like effect is often brought out by an if you like-modifier, we could assume that such a modifier is present (covertly expressed or presupposed) in the any cases under consideration and that it leads to a subtrigging effect.
(i)
a.
You must pick any flower you want to pick.
b.
\({\ensuremath{\lambda}}w.(\forall w^{\prime} \in O({\ensuremath{f_{\mathrm{CG}(\mathrm{c})}}} (c),g,{\ensuremath{c_{T}}},w))\)
\([(\forall x)[{\textrm{flower}}(x)(w^{\prime}) \& {\textrm{want}}({\ensuremath{c_{A}}} )({\ensuremath{\lambda}}y{\ensuremath{\lambda}} w.{\textrm{pick}}(x)(y)(w))(w^{\prime}) {\ensuremath{\rightarrow}\ } \textrm{pick}(x)({\ensuremath{c_{A}}} )(w^{\prime})]]\)
implication in given context: ‘speaker has given up his preference against the
addressee’s picking all the flowers he wants to pick’
Somehow, the assumptions about the background would have to ensure that the Permission-like effect is restricted to allowing only one flower to be affected (instead of an arbitrary number depending on the addressee’s wishes). This type of explanation combines (i) subtrigging as observed with necessity operators in general, and (ii) the pragmatic derivation of Permission-like effects for necessity propositions. For the moment, I don’t want to commit myself to whether such an analysis is superior to one in terms of alternatives (see Section 5.2.1) or not.
- 14.
Richard Breheny (p.c.) pointed out another puzzle. For him, the English translation of sentence (29b) also has a reading of inexhaustive possibility (roughly: ‘something (difficult) is necessary to get into a good university, and one way of saturating the requirement is e.g. to have a lot of money’).
Consequently, we encounter the prejacent problem familiar from the corresponding cases involving only (the corresponding proposition without only is not true, cf. von Fintel (1997)), cf. (31). Such a reading is not to be expected under my analysis. But so far, I have not been able to verify its existence with other speakers of English. It does not seem to be available for the German case in (29b). The issue merits further investigation.
- 15.
I think that German nur ‘only’ can express exhaustive necessity provided the modal is not interpreted teleologically:
(i)
a.
A:
Was
muss
ich
heute
tun?
What
must
I
today
do
‘What are my tasks for today?’
b.
B:
Du
musst
nur
dein
Zimmer
aufräumen.
you
must
only
your
room
tidy-up
‘Your only task is to tidy up your room.’
- 16.
Note that it is fairly straightforward to rewrite the entries for the modal operators such as to take their usual arguments (i.e. conversational backgrounds) and have them combine to yield what is now fed in as a set of worlds b. For the sake of simplicity, I stick with the propositional quantifier versions in this chapter.
- 17.
To make the analysis work for the original bracketing, we would have to lift the types of exhaustifiers and antiexhaustifiers. Abbreviating the logical type of conversational backgrounds \({\langle {i,{\langle {s,{\langle {st,t}}} \rangle} \rangle} \rangle}\) as β, they become modifiers of modal operators of type \({\langle {\beta,{\langle {\beta,{\langle {i,{\langle {st,st}}}} \rangle} \rangle} \rangle} \rangle}\).
- 18.
The restriction to non-empty backgrounds strikes me as harmless, as empty backgrounds generally give rise to various kinds of triviality results, and, in particular, seem to be irrelevant for the analysis of imperatives.
- 19.
I am indebted to Hans-Martin Gärtner (p.c.) for pointing out an error in a previous version.
- 20.
Note that (53) is motivated for independent reasons, see the discussion in Section 4.2.2 above. For the cases under consideration here, it would even suffice to assume that a speaker who expresses a proposition holds it to be possible.
- 21.
Note that this is known to be a problematic feature of the Hintikka-style possible worlds analysis of belief. Yet, it is largely uncontroversial for simple cases of conjunction elimination such as those under consideration in the following, namely that from \({\ensuremath{Bel}}_{c_S} (p \wedge q)\) it follows that \({\ensuremath{Bel}}_{c_S} p\).
- 22.
I am indebted to Tatjana Scheffler (p.c.) for pointing these cases out to me.
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Kaufmann, M. (2012). Possibility Readings. In: Interpreting Imperatives. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, vol 88. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2269-9_5
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