English imperatives and speaker commitment  

Oleh:

Takahashi, Hidemitsu

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Language Sciences (Full Text) vol. 16 no. 3-4 (1994), page 371-386.
Fulltext: 16_03-04_Takahashi.pdf (974.09KB)

Ketersediaan

Perpustakaan PKBB Nomor Panggil: 405/LAS/16 Non-tandon: tidak ada Tandon: 1

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Isi artikel

This paper characterizes English imperatives in terms of four features: hypotheticality, non-past, second person nature and speaker commitment. In particular, it will focus on the last feature, 'speaker commitment', which refers to the degree of directive force that the speaker applies toward the addressee carrying out the action. For instance, the imperative in the utterance, 'Sleep until noon; you are tired', is taken to be a command. But the identical form in 'Sleep until noon and you'll miss lunch' is not a command but rather a condition; it means 'If you sleep until noon, you'll miss lunch'. It is hypothesized that the first instance involves a high speaker commitment and the second involves a low speaker commitment. Contrary to the common belief, the 'command' sense is not an essential feature, but rather the prototypical sense, of an imperative grammatical structure, which occurs with a high speaker commitment to the addressee carrying out the action. Thus, an imperative is potentially ambiguous with respect to speaker commitment.

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