Detecting variable force in imperatives: A modalized minimal approach

Abstract

This paper draws attention to various environments in Greek which show that imperatives convey possibility and not necessity as widely assumed in the literature. The interaction of imperatives with other operators reveals the presence of an existential operator. At the same time, however, it is shown that imperatives cannot be analysed as invariably conveying possibility. Instead, I suggest an analysis in which imperative verbal mood is semantically contentful, triggering a presupposition that results in a domain restriction for the set of evaluation worlds. Combining insights from both the modal (Schwager 2006; Kaufmann 2012) and the minimal approach (Portner 2004, 2007), I show that we can have a modalized minimal analysis if we take imperative verbal mood to be contentful at a presuppositional level. This twist allows us to capture the variable quantificational force of imperatives depending on the environment they appear in.