Imperatives, V-movement and logical mood

Abstract

Imperative Vs with distinctive morphology either have a distinctive syntax (Modern Greek, Spanish), or distribute like others Vs (Serbo-Croatian, Ancient Greek). The contrast follows from properties of the root C. The first type has a strong Imperative V-feature in C, and under Chomsky's Greed Principle, Imperative Vs raise overtly to check this feature. The second type is the Wackernagel language, whose C hosts no features, but V-features are in I. If no phrase fronts, Vs move to C to support second position items. V-to-C affects all Vs, is last resort, follows Lasnik's Enlightened Self-Interest, and escapes Greed.

The Semantics of Imperatives within a Theory of Clause Types

“…marked as belonging to a certain type) through the presence of some specialized element, often seen as encoding the force of the clause. This element is viewed as residing high in the clausal structure, typically in the CP domain (e.g., Baker 1970, Cheng 1991, Rizzi 1990, Rivero & Terzi 1995, Han 1998). 2.…”

Approaches to head movement: A critical assessment

“…Another possibility is to assume that the Head Movement Constraint is wrong. Long head movement has been defended in Rivero (1991;; Rivero & Terzi (2005); Roberts (2010); Harizanov (2016) and Preminger (2017), among others.…”

Unaccusativity and the syntax of imperatives in East Circassian

“…In particular, within accounts that assume that imperative mood is represented in the syntactic architecture, the projection responsible for this semantic component is expected to merge high in the clausal periphery (see e.g. Rivero & Terzi 1995;Rizzi 1997;Han 1998;Zeijlstra 2006). The reason for this lies in the standard assumptions about the semantics of imperative force: "As Op IMP [the imperative operator -KE] encodes the illocutionary force rather than the propositional content of the sentence, it cannot be located below other functional projections" (Zeijlstra 2006:415).…”