Introduction

Abstract

Traditional linguistics, or the mainstream philosophy of language on which it is based, has a number of analyses to offer in order to account for such a sentence. We could, for instance, suggest a syntactic analysis: the sentence is in the imperative mood, it has also been the object of what was once called the negative transformation. We could, in the style of functional grammars or of enunciation linguistics, account for the presence of the grammatical marker ‘do’, that is, account for the mental operation which it inscribes within language. We could also speak the language of pragmatics, and show that the speech-act of which the sentence is the bearer is an indirect one: the imperative suggests the sentence is an order, but the presence of ‘please’ suggests that, on the contrary, it is rather a prayer (even as the canonical ‘please could you pass me the salt’ appears to be a request for information when it is really a disguised or weakened order). Lastly, we might try and account for the name as a rigid designator, in the approved manner of Kripke.