Lecture | Com(parative) Syn(tax) Series
Splitting the imperative: what prohibitives tell us about the morpho-syntax of imperatives and negation
- Date
- Thursday 26 June 2025
- Time
- Location
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 1.18
Abstract
Crosslinguistically it is very common for commands to be expressed as imperatives (Aikhenvald 2010), which are usually short verb forms, as in English ‘read!’ or Dutch ‘lees!’. Expressing a negated command, a prohibitive, is possible in a language like Dutch by combining negation with the imperative: ‘lees niet!’. However, this strategy is cross-linguistically surprisingly rare (van den Auwera 2005, Aikhenvald 2010). Several languages have been investigated in more detail: Dutch, German, Polish and Tsjech, which allow for negative imperatives, versus languages like Spanish and Italian, which use subjunctive and infinitival verb forms in prohibitives; Serbo-Croatian, which uses auxiliary constructions in prohibitives; and Korean and Japanese which use prohibitive negation. The analyses that have been put forward focus on (i) the type of negation being a head or a phrase, or have different selectional requirements (Zannuttini 1994, 1997, Zeijlstra 2006, 2022, Han & Lee 2007), (ii) a locality condition on the imperative operator and the verb, which the negation can interrupt (Rivero & Terzo 1995, Han 1998, 2000, Zeijlstra 2006, Despić 2020).
In the talk, I will show that the two theoretical insights are basically on the right track, but that the way things stand, the existing theories can only account for one or two patterns of prohibitive repair strategies, which becomes problematic in light of the vast amount of prohibitive variation reported. I argue that when we are more precise about the syntax-semantics of the imperative, it makes predictions about the morpho-syntactic patterns we find in prohibitives. I will use the performative modal approach (Schwager 2006, Kaufmann 2012), where imperative operators consists of decomposable features, related to directive force and modality. I propose that the features of this operator are bundled in some languages, and split in others (akin to bundling in other voiceTMA domains, Pollock 1989, Giorgi and Pianesi 1997). This then interacts with the location of negation, and can account for a wide variety of patterns. I will demonstrate how this works by looking at two case studies in detail: Arapaho (Algonquian), where there is evidence for splitting the modal component, and Didinga (Nilo-Saharan), where there is evidence for splitting the directive component. In the last part of the talk, I will discuss typological predictions, and discuss how this proposal can shed light on the morphological variation as well.
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