downs 1977 the imperative and pragmatics

The Imperative and PragmaticsAuthor(s): William DownesReviewed work(s):Source: Journal of Linguistics, Vol. 13, No. 1 (Mar., 1977), pp. 77-97Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4175378 .

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JLI3 (I977) 1-I52 Printed in Great Britain

The imperative and pragmatics

WILLIAM DOWNES

School of English and American Studies, University of East Anglia

(Received 13 July 1976)

This article is a tentative exploration of the following question. In an account of the imperative construction in English, what should be accounted for in the syntax or semantics and what in the pragmatics?1 In the literature, we find descriptions of an imperative construction with certain specific syntactic properties. For example, there is a subjectless form and also a form with a second person pronominal subject and corresponding to both there are second person pronominal forms in reflexive and tag counterparts. Abstract underlying structures, in this case a you subject, which subsequently may be deleted by IMPERATIVE

or EQUI, are postulated to explain these properties (Postal, I964; Katz & Postal, I964: 75; McCawley, I968). My question is: if we postulate a general pragmatic theory, that is, a theory of the use of utterances in context (separate from but related to theories about the syntactic or semantic properties of sentences), how many of the properties of the imperative can be explained in such terms instead of in the syntax or semantics? My conclusion is that the proposed abstract structures are syntactically and semantically unmotivated and unnecessary for pragmatic interpretation. Each property that the abstract elements explain is better explained either as a non-arbitrary property of main clause infinitives when they are used to utter commands (non-arbitrary in that the facts could not be otherwise), or inherent properties of main clause infinitives in all their uses. In the former case at least, they are facts about men in situations, not about syntax. Thus, syntax and semantics require only a single level of representation and there is no imperative transformation. In fact, what I am suggesting is that the proposal that Sadock (1974: 77) calls 'the surface meaning hypothesis' or what Ross (1970: 254) calls 'the pragmatic analysis' provides a plausible account of the imperative construction itself.

It is necessary, first of all, to distinguish between the illocutionary potential of the construction, that is the range of illocutionary acts it can be used to perform, and the grammatical construction itself. In fact, almost any sentence type can be used to perform a great variety of acts. There are numerous cases where

[i] This paper was read at the 1976 Spring Meeting of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain in Edinburgh and an earlier somewhat different paper on the same subject was presented at the Second Systemic Theory Workshop held at the University of Essex in July 1975. I would like to thank the participants at both meetings for their questions, criticisms and suggestions and, in particular, Jean Aitchison and Dick Hudson for their detailed comments on the earlier version of this paper.

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JOURNAL OF LINGUISTICS

infinitive constructions either identical to the imperative or very similar to it can be used to perform utterances which are not commands. I will merely list some examples. There are WISH IMPERATIVES, Sleep zvell (Stockwell, Schachter & Partee, I973: 637); PERMISSION IMPERATIVES, Come home at three in the morning (if you like) (Stockwell et al, I973; 637); HYPOTHETICAL INFINITIVES, Marry an American; never. John be rude; that isn't like him (Bolinger, I967: 352); REPLIES

IN CONTEXT, He doesn't know what to do. Make a fresh start; that's what I'd do (Bolinger, I967: 353); and CONDITIONAL CONSTRUCTIONS which may be REQUESTS,

PROMISES, THREATS, WARNINGS or simply ASSERTIONS of general truths:

Step in now (and) the doctor will see you. Come here (and) I'll give you a pound. Be our candidate (and) we'll obviously win. Join the navy (and) see the world. Defy your boss (and) you'll get sacked. Eat too much candy (and) you'll be sick. Try to please somebody (and) all you'll get is disappointed.

Bolinger (I967: 343) shows clearly that in spite of the diverse illocutionary potential of these conditional forms, all the cases have grammatical properties with regard to be which are peculiar to the imperative. Sadock (I974: 139 ff.) also notes INSTRUCTION uses of the construction in manuals, recipes and labels. Huddleston (197I: 59) remarks on the distinct force of SUPPOSE clauses in scientific English ('Suppose there are n molecules. . .') and, of course, there is BEGGING, PLEADING and so on. I believe that whatever differences can be observed in the construction in this diversity of uses can be accounted for as reflexes of the use. For example, the absence of direct objects in LABELS, Shake well before using, is explained by Sadock (1974: I41) by noting that the object must refer '. . . to the item to which the label is affixed, or to the contents . . .'. This is hardly a syntactic or semantic rule but a contextual utterance constraint. Although the non-command uses of main clause infinitives is not as wide as, say, grammatical declaratives, it is considerable. However, I think that there is no inherent grammatical or semantic property common to the uses which might motivate some abstract morpheme like IMPERE (Sadock, I974: 15I) to link them. What they have in common is the predication of a hypothetical act of a contextually specifiable subject (see below) and this information is all available in the surface structure.

Conversely, practically any sentence in English, that does not contradict the preconditions on commanding, can be used to utter a command. The pragmatic theory needed to account for this will require at least two parts. One part will be statements of the sort worked out by Searle (I969) regarding the speaker's beliefs about preconditions that must be met in the situation before an utterance can 'happily' perform a given intention; for example, in the case at hand, that

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THE IMPERATIVE AND PRAGMATICS

the 'Hearer is able to do the act' and 'the speaker believes the hearer is able to do the act'. The second part will be a set of statements including Grice's (I968) 'co-operative principle' and its maxims, such as 'Be relevant': these together generate arguments which allow the speaker to rationally intend that the hearer can infer that

Your water is lovely and hot now.

might mean, Turn off the water heater or Get into the tub or Do the dishes or an indeterminate number of other commands depending on the context of the utterance. Alternatively, of course, the speaker might only be asserting his belief in the truth of the proposition. Note that Labov's attempts to formulate rules of discourse require reference to two such parts (Labov, I972: 297-306). Since the content of this theory is so clearly utterances in context it is obvious that it is a theory of utterance, or more generally 'sign' use, and not about the linguistic system. Indeed, it can account for the interpretation of gestures, abstract road signs or the 'meaning' of a box of soap placed next to a pile of dirty laundry. Also, a pragmatic theory must take cognizance of various higher level contextual factors (Labov, 1972: 30I; Turner, 1970: 205; Lakoff, R., 1972: 9IO). Thus, whether an utterance such as the above example is more likely to be taken as a command or an assertion in some context may depend on whether the participants have negotiated a mutual aim that they are having an argument or perform- ing a task or just chatting. It also will depend on norms invoked by the utterance being part of a mutually recognized speech event, the social relation of the participants, and, as well, possible placements of the utterance in conversational structure, say, as a 'pre-closing' (Schegloff & Sacks, I974: 246). Constraints imposed by such factors are clearly 'in the air' or context and are neither syntactic or semantic.

However, the constructions with command illocutionary potential can be placed on a scale of illocutionary opacity.2 Where a construction appears on such a scale depends on the absence or presence of an argument linking the inferred force and the sentence used to perform the utterance and, further, if an argument is present, how conventionalized it is. At one end of the scale are OVERT PERFORMATIVE formulas which require only that the preconditions be met. Next, we have IMPERATIVES which must be tested against a range of alternative preconditions some of which were mentioned above. Next, are PEREMPTORY

DECLARATIVES such as You will close the window and similar forms in can and, then, the corresponding interrogatives, REQUESTS or WHIMPERATIVES:

Will you close the window?

[2] Peter Wexler has pointed out to me that Bentham in Of laws in general (1782) arranges the form of commands '. . . in such a manner that the mode of expression grows gradually more and more unexplicit or oblique...'.

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which require only a simple conventional argument involving the preconditions. More opaque types are interrogatives and declaratives WITH RELEVANT PROPOSI-

TIONAL CONTENT, When are you coming home? ('Come home'), You're the man to fix my radio ('Fix my radio') and finally all those cases where the PROPOSITION

MUST BE INFERRED, for example, Your water is lovely and hot now which, as noted above, might mean Turn off the water heater or Do the dishes and so on. At this end of the scale, practically any sentence can be said to have the illocutionary potential of commanding in some context. Overt markers of command force like please or kindly can only occur where the indirection is conversationally irrelevant, and can serve to mitigate the command. In opaque forms, the indirection itself serves this (and other) conversational purposes by allowing the hearer the latitude to feign misunderstanding, topically deflect or otherwise reply to the command or its preconditions, and please would give the game away by overtly marking the speaker's intention.

S (NP) VP

wash

Figure I. Surface structure analysis.

S

Pre S NP AUX VP

IMP N TNS M V

you pres. will wash

Figure 2. Syntactic deep structure analysis.

It is clear that at the non-opaque end of the scale, the construction itself must either, as in the case of unambiguous overt performatives, overtly encode the preconditions on commanding, or, at least, be overtly compatible with the preconditions. Since the imperative, unlike the performative, has a range of other uses, overt compatibility with the preconditions on commanding is all that is logically required for it to be relatively non-opaque in this use.

In the light of the above discussion, let us examine three possible linguistic analyses of the imperative construction; the SURFACE STRUCTURE ANALYSIS, Figure I, the Katz and Postal syntactic DEEP STRUCTURE ANALYSIS, Figure 2 (Katz & Postal, I964: 74-79) and the PERFORMATIVE ANALYSIS, Figure 3 (Ross, 1970:

8o




NP AUX / VP \

NlP AUJX VP

I //\ I N TNS

you pres. will wash

Figure 3. Performative analysis.

223; McCawley, I968: 155-I6I; Lakoff, 1971: 284; Sadock, 1974). I think it can be plausibly argued that the surface structure analysis is to be preferred and that the latter two analyses run into considerable difficulties. I will present four arguments to support this claim.

i. THE SUBJECT OF IMPERATIVES

Consider the problem of the subject of imperatives. The arguments in support of an underlying you subject are well known. However, as soon as the data of third person subjects is examined difficulties arise. Thus, we get a range of indefinite third person pronouns and other deictic subjects. For example:

F Anybody I Everybody

Whoever (who) want(s) to eat now, wash themselves I first. Those (yourselves f All those etc.

As well, a wide range of other NP's commonly occur as subjects of imperatives:

r The oldest of the girls ) their The boys J stop your writing now The boy in the corner his All the children in Cthemselves. the front row and washt yourselves. etc. J Lhimself. J

Suggestions have been made (Stockwell et al, 1973: 643 ff.; Huddleston, 197I: 56) that such sentences are derived from an underlying second person

8i




partitive construction, of you, or among you, with a third person NP subject. However, as Stockwell et al (I973, 643 ff.) point out, there is no standard theory deep structure which would be well formed for all cases. Thus, for example:

*The boy in the corner among you stand up. ~of

is ill formed. Thorne (I966) has also attempted to locate a single grammatical source for the

subjects of imperatives. He proposes that the surface subjects of all imperative sentences must be vocative. To the degree that this requirement is simply a way of stating that they must refer to the addressee then his claim is exactly equivalent to a pragmatic constraint (see below). If, however, the feature [+ vocative] is to define a natural and coherent grammatical class, then there are obvious difficulties in accounting for the distribution of you which require some fairly arbitrary devices. For example, you is claimed to be the vocative 'form' of third person pronouns. Thorne is also forced to assert that somebody is the 'reduced' form of a 'full' vocative * You somebody to account for the ungrammaticality of the latter. The use of terms like 'form of', 'full' and 'reduced' is required to produce a single plausible underlying source of imperative subjects, given the heterogeneity of the class involved. Furthermore, claiming that you is the vocative form of the definite article excludes sentences like The boys hand in their work now from being imperative; a judgment with which I cannot agree. Finally, Thorne's claim that subjeetless imperatives such as Wash have underlying subjects which are the 'reduced' vocative forms of the indefinite pronoun (i.e. Somebody wash) predicts, as Huddleston notes, that Wash and You wash '. . . differ with respect of the definiteness of the underlying subject (you in the latter deriving from a definite pronoun). . .' (Huddleston, 197I: 50). But this is not the case: the addressee of Wash may be no less definite than that of You wash. I believe Stockwell's claim that there is no single standard theory deep structure for all cases is well founded.

Another possibility would be to generate a pre-subject vocative you NP in deep structure which would account for the second person reflexives above and which can occur, with a separate tone group, in the surface of non-pronominal or diectic third person imperatives.

/You/ the boy in the corner stand up/.

This doesn't account for the ungrammaticality of */You/ Everybody who wants to eat now, wash yourselves first/, and there is a further difficulty with this analysis I'll return to in a moment.

The fact of the matter is that the subject NP must refer to the hearer of the utterance, the addressee. Any NP whatever that does not exclude this interpretation can be the subject of an imperative. (That these third person NPs are

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subjects is shown by the distribution of NEG, for example, Don't the boys leave the room just yet.) Thus, what must be explained is not a linguistic constraint or natural grammatical class but a fact about participant relations. There is a major discontinuity between grammatical patterning and pragmatic constraints here. This implies that one will find no single syntactic class to act as deep structure subject containing a marker of grammatical second person, although there are scattered correlates of the pragmatic constraint evinced by the behaviour of you in imperatives.

The surface structure analysis would leave the subject of imperatives uncon- strained, including 0. That the hearer is the one who is to do the action is already stated in the preconditions and a pragmatic rule would note, that, if the other preconditions on commanding are met, then the subject of a main clause infinitive would be interpreted as the intended hearer if it can be. Indeed, this is a func- tional explanation of subjectless imperatives. To supply a subject if there is no good reason would be conversationally redundant and break the 'Don't supply more information than is necessary' Gricean maxim. Note that in those cases where a subject is supplied it is with good reason and the hearer can infer that some conversational purpose is served, either to specify the addressee's identity where this is required, All those who. . ., or contrastively, YOU go next, or to serve a persuasive function of some kind, for example, Come on - you give it a try.

A pragmatic rule such as the one proposed is congruent with the notion of 'perceptual strategies', see, for example, Bever (1970) and also George Lakoff's current interest on the relation of grammatical rules and general 'processing principles' (Lecture at University College London, 14 June 1976).

This account also provides a natural source for the tension between third person and second person reflexive and possessive pronouns in the above examples. Syntactically, their and themselves are anaphoric to the third person subject NP. Pragmatically, your and yourselves are situationally anaphoric to the hearer, who is being addressed, and therefore is referred to by you as in declaratives. This fluctuation of second and third person reflexive and possessive pronouns is further evidence against the proposal, mentioned above, that a pre-subject vocative you is in the deep structure of all imperatives and accounts for second person pronouns with third person subjects. Such a you would automatically prevent third person pronouns from ever occurring since

*/You/ the students in the corner stop writing their essays and wash themselves now/.

is ungrammatical. It might be argued that a pragmatic explanation of second person reflexive

imperatives without syntactic antecedents is too theoretically costly since it means abandoning REFLEXIVE, with its syntactic clause mate condition, a rule which is crucial for many major syntactic arguments. To save the rule, one might

83




assume that reflexive pronouns never occur without a syntactic antecedent, and use overtly antecedentless reflexives to motivate underlying antecedents. In fact, this is the form Ross' (I970) arguments involving reflexives take. Since any reflexive pronoun can occur with main clause infinitives without an overt syntactic antecedent, for example, Wash himself, herself, myself, etc. as echoes, hypothetical infinitives, or exclamatives, this assumption motivates underlying representations such as, Did you say, suggest, hint etc. that Xi wash Xi; I exclaim that I am surprised (that you said) that Xi wash Xi etc.

It seems to me that the more intuitively satisfying approach would be to keep the syntactic reflexive rule in those cases where clause mates do occur, but, in the case of main clause infinitives to permit the generation of antecedentless reflexive pronouns. These pronouns will then trigger a search of context for a possible non-linguistic antecedent. My contention is that the pragmatic analysis explains the contextual nature of the facts, does no violence to the use of abstract entities in syntax and is probably closer to what happens psychologically.

The pragmatic rule I mentioned is very general. Further evidence that it does not belong in a specifically linguistic theory is that it applies to gestures and other signalling systems. Take 'beckoning' as a non-linguistic command; one can point to the addressee, then beckon, or, if the intended addressee is clear, just beckon. Similarly, if one sees a red stop light, and the preconditions on commanding are met, one knows that it is oneself, the observer, that the traffic authorities intend to stop. It could even be suggested, I think, that babies and pet dogs (when beckoned to) might know that they are intended to do the act in the absence of other plausible addressees. All this suggests that one is dealing with something quite apart from the language system.

The performative analysis deals with the subject of imperatives being constrained to the addressee in terms of the required identity of the direct object NP you of the performative verb order and the subject you of the embedded sentence. The latter you is then deleted by Equi (McCawley, I968: I56). How- ever, Schmerling (I 975) points out that subjectless imperatives cannot be derived by the application of Equi as McCawley claims. Even if we grant that Equi can apply, it is hard to see how lexical insertion into direct object and embedded subject NPs can be constrained to exclude those third person NPs which cannot be addressees, even in the light of McCawley's (I968; 197I) proposals for abstract representation of intended referents. How can lexical material be marked as referring to a possible addressee? A head noun might be a plausible addressee but the factor excluding the NP might be in a modifying phrase:

?The girl who can't hear me come here. ?The baby girl come here. ?*My ambassador to you come here. ?The woman who was most influential in Cromwell's time come here. *A certain girl come here.

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Secondly, whether or not an NP can refer to a hearer is often dependent on speaker's judgments and thus is non-linguistic and contingent. Thirdly, surface properties such as length may make NP's implausible addressees. If, on the other hand, the semantic representation is to permit as semantically well-formed any NP in object and embedded subject position and simply define it as intended addressee, then some further interpretation of this representation will be required to exclude NP's which cannot be addressees. This is consistent with the current generative semantics position (Seuren, 1974) and perhaps would be accomplished by adjudging well-formedness relative to 'pragmatic' presuppositions (Lakoff, 197ia; Keenan, 197I: 49; Stalnaker, 1972). But this, however, would simply duplicate the statement of the non-linguistic pragmatic constraints I suggested and can be done as easily from the surface structure.

2. THE UNDERLYING MODAL, 'WILL

Secondly, consider the underlying pres. + will. The arguments for this are also familiar. I shall mention only two problems with this proposed underlying form.

The first difficulty arises because, as is well known, four modals can appear in tagged imperatives:

won't you. 9 can't you. l

Wash0 would you. r

could you. J Since this is the case, following the logic of the argument from tags, it would be necessary to permit any of these modals to be generated in the underlying structure of imperatives. This would mean that an imperative like Wash might have as its source any of the four alternatives: You can/will/would/could/ wash. Since can and will have clearly different meanings, this predicts that Wash is potentially at least two ways ambiguous. But Wash is unambiguous.

The second point has to do with the futurity of imperatives. As Bolinger (I967: 338) points out: 'If a command is an order that is to be carried out, it is necessarily understood as referring to the future - futurity is part of the definition of "command".' This is reflected in Searle's propositional content rule. For a device to be a request, it must refer to a 'future Act of Hearer'. The point is in line with my previous comments; since this is a condition which must exist in the situation for ANY device (gestures, stoplights, etc.) to perform a command, it is hardly necessary to represent it in the syntax. Bolinger continues, '. . . Katz and Postal's emphasis on will becomes not a desire to prove that commands refer to the future but simply an interest in detecting the underlying linguistic correlate of futurity'. But will is not the only possible linguistic correlate of futurity; for example, there is going to and are to.

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However, it may NOT be the case that imperatives are restricted to future time reference (Bolinger, I967: 348 ff.). The crucial condition may be that the speaker does not know that the act has been carried out or carried out in a certain way. We might say that imperatives are incompatible with 'verified by speaker' past time reference. Since verification includes future time (one cannot verify an act yet to be performed), the more general constraint on imperatives is that the act must be unverified by the speaker or hypothetical as far as the speaker is concerned.

Thus, one finds imperatives referring to acts which have been completed or might have been completed in past time but which the speaker has not verified, for example:

Don't have hit your head, please. (Parent upon hearing a crash in back room.)

or to present time:

Have a present daddy, please. Be thinking nice thoughts about me.

The important feature is hypotheticalness. Since the bare infinitive has this property in all its uses, the contention that the imperative is the bare infinitive used to command is quite as plausible as the underlying will analysis. However, I would like to maintain Searle's futurity precondition for true commands and call the above 'wishes'. But, since all that was required of imperatives was that they be compatible with the preconditions and since hypothetical acts include all future acts, the linguistic correlate of the futurity precondition is the inherent hypothetical property of infinitives and the surface structure analysis represents this property.

It is worth noting as well at this point that this precondition also automatically excludes time adverbials like yesterday from a non-opaque command:

*I order you to come yesterday. *Wash yesterday. *Can you wash yesterday? *Will you wash yesterday?

3. IMP AND THE UNDERLYING PERFORMATIVE

Let us consider some arguments which can be used to justify the abstract IMP morpheme or the underlying performative order. There are two kinds of argument. First, both analyses would disambiguate sentences like:

You will go home.

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as between a 'command' and a 'prediction' reading (Boyd & Thorne, I969: 63) (granted that one accepts the arguments for underlying will in the first place). Secondly, there is a range of arguments based on the observation that certain sentence adverbials like maybe, perhaps and certainly, negative preverbs such as scarcely, hardly, etc., and classes of verb, namely statives like want, hope, believe, understand, etc., don't occur in imperatives. Katz and Postal explain this in terms of co-occurrence restrictions with the underlying IMP and the performative analysis excludes these automatically since the same restrictions obtain with the higher performative order.

Let us consider the ambiguity question first. I would argue that a sentence like You will go home is SEMANTICALLY only the predication of a future act of a subject which could be the hearer. An obvious illocutionary force of the utterance of such a sentence would be that the speaker is asserting that he believes that the proposition is true, that is, he is making a prediction. Now it is, I believe, a general property of predictions that they can be further interpreted as commands by pragmatic rules. This is the case either if the subject is the addressee or if the hearer believes that the future state of affairs predicted is somehow his responsibility as, for example, in a sentence like These scripts will be marked by Thursday in an instance where the hearer is a teacher with responsibility for correcting scripts and the speaker is his superior. A hearer must test the semantic predication of some future state of affairs against both prediction and, if prediction, then further against command preconditions, if he judges that he is crucially involved in the truth of the prediction.

Thus a prediction by a speaker that might require an otherwise unintended act of the hearer to be performed if it is to be true can be interpreted by the hearer as an attempt to get him to do the act, since the speaker is asserting that he un- equivocally knows the future behaviour of the hearer, perhaps by virtue of his authority. If the hearer does not do the act, he puts the speaker in the position of having uttered an untrue sentence and makes the speaker look the fool, making unwarranted predictions about the hearer and his actions. Of course, face can be renegotiated in a number of ways. For example, either the speaker can retroactively reinterpret his intention as merely having made a prediction about the hearer, which could be wrong, or the hearer can misinterpret or feign interpretation of the utterance as a prediction and thus, more or less tactfully, refuse to admit the speaker's knowledge and authority. The key factors are the relationship of the speaker and hearer and the content of the proposition given the situation.

A direct performative representation of our example such as:

s[I order you s[you will go home]]

obscures this, 'commanding by predicting' step. My claim, then, is that such sentences are inherently only predications of a future act of some subject and

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are semantically unambiguous, but can be interpreted as either commands or predictions following conversational rules. This proposal captures the point made by both Lyons (I966: 120) and Huddleston (I97I: 5I) that sentences like You will go home are vague rather than clearly ambiguous. Therefore, the abstract representation of commanding in underlying structure is unmotivated syntactically and semantically. For a somewhat different formulation of the conversational interpretation of statements or questions see Gordon & Lakoff (I97I) and Labov (I972: 304). As noted above, conversational rules are certainly required elsewhere to account for the more opaque commands and this proposal merely extends them to PEREMPTORY DECLARATIVES. Note also that no one suggests that an underlying performative order underlies all commands, for example, Your water is lovely and hot now. And, if they did, the command potential of practically any declarative would conclusively refute the performative analysis (Sadock, I974: 77).

Evidence for viewing sentences like You will go home as cases of 'commanding by predicting' is provided by a very interesting property of the ambiguity; that is, the ambiguity is LOP-SIDED depending on the 'obviousness' of the propositional content in relation to the preconditions in context. That is, if the propositional content is of the sort that a speaker, in that context, might not be able to or want to order the hearer to do or the hearer might not be able to do, then the favoured interpretation will be the prediction, although in other contexts the same content might be more plausibly a command. For example, compare A and B:

DECONTEXTUALIZED

rgo home1 go home likely command, possible A You will . carry out the garbage e. likcton

open the window J prediction

B You will get a job in Canada next likely prediction, possible command

The favoured interpretation will shift depending on context. B, for example, could be a likely command in the specific context of an intelligence officer being given instructions.

This property is even clearer with WHIMPERATIVES; contrast C and D. (For a full discussion of whimperatives see Green, 1975.)

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DECONTEXTUALIZED

{go home likely command, possible C Can you i carry out the garbage question

Copen the window 9 qei

D Can you get a job in Canada next? likely question, possible command

In this case, the ambiguity will lean towards the command as opposed to the question interpretation depending on the 'obviousness' to both the speaker and the hearer that the proposition is true, given the context, and the only rational answer is 'yes'. I call this a pseudo-question because it doesn't meet the precondition for questioning, namely, that the speaker 'doesn't believe that the proposition is true, but does believe it may be true' (Hudson, 1975: 7, quoting Katz, 1972: 2IO). On the contrary, in the command reading of whimperatives the speaker does believe the proposition is true. The function of the question is to draw the hearer's attention to this fact (i.e. that the speaker believes the proposition is true in the situation); and therefore the ability precondition is 'obviously' met - thus 'commanding by questioning'. Note then that the favouring of one interpretation, which will be a question of degree depending on the agreement of speaker and hearer on what is 'obviously' true in context, has nothing to do with the construction itself, but with the content of the utterance relative to the participants' beliefs. This, it seems to me, is evidence against Sadock's position that whimperatives have an inherent imperative semantic property which must be represented in underlying structure (Sadock, I974: 104). The command potential varies with content and speaker's and hearer's belief of its truth from specific situation to specific situation. C, for example, would have the favoured interpretation of a question if the hearer was aged or frail and could not obviously carry out garbage, etc. Most of the discussions of this area employ only examples which are easily interpretable as commands when decontextualized, and this, of course, obscures the inherent lop-sidedness of the construction.

Sadock advances the interesting hypothesis that certain indirect speech acts like whimperatives, although originally requiring interpretation, acquire an inherent command semantic property, by a process analogous to idiom formation, and show formal features relating to that property (Sadock, 1974: 97 ff.). It would follow that hearers interpret can you and will you as overt markers of command force and therefore do not have to reason out the 'use' from the 'meaning' as I proposed above. It is certainly true that the reasoning itself is highly

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conventionalized, thus: 'S asks a question about my ability to do A. Of course, I CAN obviously do A in this context. S must know this so he can't be requesting information. Therefore S must be drawing my attention to the fact that he believes the ability precondition on commands is met. The only reason why S would do this is that S wants me to do A.' However, I would suggest that this conventionalized reasoning must be operative with whimperatives since the interpretation the hearer arrives at is contingent on his beliefs about the content in context. He must evaluate the semantic content against both possible illocutionary interpretations in any instance and can only do this by going through the interpretative procedure, just as he does with the more opaque, less conventionalized forms. Therefore, conversational rules must necessarily be involved in the correct interpretation of requests or whimperatives and an underlying marker of command force would be misleading just as it is in the peremptory declarative case.

Let us turn to the arguments that have to do with constraints on classes of items, sentence adverbials and so on. I would suggest that these constraints might be explained by the interaction between the preconditions and the semantics of the particular items in question.

Consider, for example, just maybe and perhaps. The items occur in you will... declaratives but not in the corresponding imperatives, so:

f maybe ) maybe you will come tomorrow perhaps

* maybe perhaps come tomorrow

Let us agree that the first examples have command potential and also prediction potential, the command force being somewhat mitigated by the adverbial. In declaratives perhaps and maybe relate to the speaker's beliefs about the truth of the proposition. If I say Perhaps/maybe the telephone is broken, what I am saying is that I do not certainly believe that it is the case. I require more evidence, perhaps from you, regarding whether the phone is broken or not, so view my utterance as an hypothesis which may be true or false. As such, it is clear that perhaps and maybe are congruent with predictions. It simply weakens the con- viction of the prediction somewhat and would be incompatible with a prediction which a speaker firmly believed to be the case, compare:

Perhaps, men will go to the stars someday. ?Perhaps, the sun will rise tomorrow.

In the you will... sentences, we have seen that the adverbials are quite compatible with a prediction reading, but why should they be so with a command reading? When perhaps or maybe are appended to predictions about a future act of the hearer, the speaker claims less authoritative knowledge about the hearer aind his acts and correspondingly the hearer is, or appears to be, less bound to

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do the act. The speaker is asserting that he is less sure the hearer will do the act, thus, the speaker is speaking with less authority about what the hearer will do and the hearer appears freer to do otherwise. Hedge the prediction and you mitigate the command.

The occurrence of these adverbials with You will. . . forms is an effect of and further evidence for the fact that, even when commanding, they are still predictions. The adverbs co-occur with predictions and are carried over to commanding by predicting. The sentence type is not inherently a command. Similarly with whimperatives, at least with perhaps.

cwil you, perhaps, open the door?

A reason why perhaps and maybe only marginally could occur with imperative or overt performative command is that they are incompatible with the essential condition, 'counts as an attempt to get the hearer to do the act'. If the action is 'perhaps' or 'maybe' to be performed the speaker can hardly bind the hearer to do it. Another possibility lies in the fact that overt performatives (and this would carry over to imperatives since, although they perform a variety of acts, they cannot assert) cannot be true or false (Austin, i962: 5). Since, in assertions maybe and perhaps relate to the speaker's assessment of his belief in the truth of the proposition and since commands cannot be true or false, the items are excluded. In both arguments, it is pragmatic considerations that exclude the items.

Another fact might be noted here. As far as I know, in many of the other uses of main clause infinitives maybe and perhaps, and also scarcely and hardly are also excluded. Thus, in a clear example of a warning:

Mf Perhabp defy your boss and you'll get sacked.

~fHardly (Scrly defy your boss and you'll get sacked.

and similarly for some complement sentences:

{ scarcely hardlyI *John wanted to perhaps r speak.

maybe J Thus, whatever accounts for the co-occurrence of these items and infinitives it can hardly be just an underlying marker of command force.

There are also clear problems with the argument based on the supposed exclusion of stative verbs, like hope, want, understand and so on. In the first place such a constraint would simply duplicate the ability precondition; one cannot order someone to do something they are not able to do. But more important is the fact that these verbs cannot be excluded under this condition since whether or

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not the ability precondition is met or not is contingent on the speaker's beliefs and this will vary socially in unpredictable ways. For many speakers,

Hope for salvation, my child. Believe the promises God made you. Want to succeed with all your heart. Hope for success.

are perfectly 'happy'. It depends on the speaker's beliefs about the hearers ability to control his inner life. Underlying structures can't be motivated by contingent non-linguistic facts about beliefs.

4. SOME FALSE PREDICTIONS

In considering the performative analysis, Wilson (1975: 9 ff.) has noted two false predictions that follow from deriving imperatives from underlying performatives. On the one hand, if imperatives are restricted so that they are derived from a single illocutionary verb, for example, order, such that all imperatives are construed as orders, then a sentence such as, Try some of this cake I've baked and that's NOT an order, will be predicted to be contradictory, but it is not. Clearly Try some of this cake I've baked is congruent with the preconditions on a number of illocutionary acts and it is therefore possible to deny that it is intended to be any of those acts (except one) in the same sentence without contradiction.

On the other hand, given that Eat the cake might be paraphrased by a complement sentence containing any one of a number of performative verbs other than order, for example, request, advise, beg, plead, suggest and so on, Wilson argues that, 'if the matrix performative may be any of these, an imperative ... will be predicted as multiply ambiguous, having a different reading for each possible speech act it may be used to perform'. But Eat the cake is not ambiguous. Wilson's intuition is that listeners may be sure that they know what Eat the cake means and may also be sure that it is not ambiguous, although they might not be sure of the exact force that it was intended to convey.

Facts such as these can be accounted for naturally in the pragmatic analysis. A number of acts such as beg, plead, request, order, etc., may all have 'it in common that they count as attempts to get the hearer to do the act (or involve recommending that the hearer do the act, see 'advise', Searle, I969: 67) and the hearer may unambiguously perceive that intention. More delicately, however, other preconditions are involved to distinguish, for example, ordering from requesting from pleading. For example, ordering may involve 'by virtue of the authority of the speaker' in contrast to requesting. Thus, in some contexts, although the hearer may know that the utterance unambiguously counts as an attempt to get him to do the act, the exact force may be subject to negotiation, or social judgments of relative authority in that context or left purposely vague

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either because it is irrelevant or to leave social relations uninvoked. Indeed, I think the linguistic realization of pleading is iterative, A. Tell me what you feel, B. No, I'm sleepy, A. Please, I want to know, B. Tomorrow, A. No, tell me now, and begging involves this and abjectness of demeanour, so, out of context, an utterance may be uninterpretable as pleading or begging. It follows that an imperative may have the potential of unambiguously trying to get the hearer to do something, but be vague as to the exact force.

It seems impossible, then, that imperatives are derived from underlying performatives without either predicting non-attested contradictions or ambiguities.

CONCLUSION

It has been shown that everything required for main clause infinitives to have the illocutionary potential of commanding in a non-opaque fashion is present in the surface structure. Whether a given utterance of a main clause infinitive is in fact a command or not has to do with the speakers' beliefs about the situation of the utterance. The proposed abstract underlying structures are merely attempts to build into the linguistic description non-linguistic facts about commands; this is unnecessary given the properties of the surface structure.

I believe attempts to represent non-linguistic facts about commands in the grammar is also misguided from a wider theoretical point of view for a number of reasons. Linguistic theory tries to specify arbitrary properties of the linguistic system, facts which could be otherwise but are not, and thus are defining of natural language. Formal notations are crucial in this. Everything that can be expressed in a notation can also be expressed in ordinary English; the reasons that grammars are formalized are twofold. First, a notation that has specific properties and that defines only the restricted class of sets of strings which are natural languages makes restricted claims about language by virtue of the properties of the notation. Ordinary English can define any set of strings and make any claim and therefore is unrevealing in defining the much smaller class which are natural languages (Sampson, I975: 87). Secondly, formalized grammars with their radically constrained claims are empirical in the sense that counter- examples can, in principle, be observed to refute them. One thing is clear, that is, if a formal linguistic theory is not to be empty it must restrict the object of its description to determinate properties of language itself, for example, grammaticality.

Now the object of a pragmatic theory, the use of utterances in situations, has properties which exclude it from proper description by a grammar. First, the facts involved are describable in the same terms as non-linguistic signalling systems, such as gestures, and thus properly belong outside the grammar. Secondly, the preconditions could not be otherwise and therefore tell us nothing specifically about the linguistic system. Thirdly, the facts are contingent on

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speakers and hearers' beliefs about preconditions that obtain for utterances in situation. These beliefs will vary in unpredictable ways. Since these facts are of a different order than linguistic facts, we will not want to explain them in a grammar, but in a theory of language use.

There are two properties of language use which may pose problems for a scientific theory of use, in the sense of defining a class of impossibilities. These are the creativity of language use and the inherent indeterminacy of utterance meaning. The extraordinary illocutionary potential of sentence illustrated by Your water is lovely and hot now (see above) is a major source of the creativity of language. Chomsky (I965: 6) describes the creative aspect of language as the ability of speakers to produce an infinite number of situationally appropriate sentences, although elsewhere this notion is restricted to syntactic recursiveness. However, the illocutionary potential of sentences is creative, in the sense defined by Sampson (1975: 54 ff.) in that it is impossible to predict, based on past instances, the possible illocutionary potential or the utterance meaning of a given sentence. It is impossible, for example, to say that a given sentence cannot be a command or, when a command, that it cannot command a given act. Likewise for whether the preconditions are met. This is the case because whether or not a Gricean argument can be constructed by the speaker and perceived by the hearer is dependent on their imaginations in the context of their shared knowledge. The speaker may see some way of uttering a sentence as a command by conceiving the situation in some quite original manner. A test of this is to take any unlikely declarative sentence and try to imagine a situation where it could be used to utter a command - one can't predict that it can't be done for any sentence. It is significant to note that this creativity of language is not a direct property of the linguistic system itself, that is, the semantic, syntactic or phonological properties of sentences. Rather, when constructing a Gricean argument to work out the intention of the speaker in uttering a sentence, the pragmatics must merely utilize the semantic properties of the sentence. For example, the semantics of I'm cold must be utilized to connect it with The window/door etc. is open or The heater is off or Coffee makes me warm and so on indefinitely, to reason out its respective utterance meaning, Shut the window/door etc., Turn on the heater, Get a cup of coffee and so on. But these meanings aren't part of the semantics of I'm cold.

Furthermore, from the hearer's point of view, utterance meaning will be indeterminate between a small number of possibilities in any given context, that is, it is essentially indeterminate (Garfinkel & Sacks, I970; Wooton, I975). Of course, the inherent indeterminacy of utterance meaning from the hearer's point of view (what the speaker might have MEANT in uttering that) is exactly what one would expect given language as both a social and an individual possession. Individuals are unique, free, and necessarily know things somewhat differently but within the collective constraint of making sense in terms of what they think

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others think or can think (their 'shared knowledge') and the rules of the com- munication system. What is 'meant', then, except for ritualized exchanges, will have to be worked towards, explicated, and negotiated by participants in ongoing conversations.

These properties suggest that a theory of use cannot be a predictive and generative device to assign meanings to utterances. Either a theory of how speakers encode their intentions and hearers decode them will be 'explicatory' and pro- vide after the fact explanations for instances from a general explanation of how conversation works or, since situations radically limit possible rational interpretations, it will be 'predictive' in a probabilistic sense, specifying a small number of probable interpretations in any given instance.

We are now in a position to pre-empt what might be a principal objection to this paper and also to relate a pragmatic analysis, such as that proposed for imperatives, to the rest of the grammar. It can be argued, as Ross (1970) has argued, that if there were a pragmatic theory it would '. . . have to specify formally what features of the infinite set of possible contexts can be of linguistic relevance ... (and that) furthermore, these features would have to be described by the same primes which are used for the description of linguistic elements, so that rules that range over syntactic elements will also range over them' (Ross, I970: 257). First, it is clear that the outlines of a pragmatic theory have emerged recently, so that there is an alternative to the performative analysis. Secondly, the requirement that situational features be expressed in a formal notation is premature and the further requirement that it utilize the same primes (e.g. NP, VP, 'subject of' etc.) is based on the mixing together of two distinct objects of description. It is possible to state, as Searle does, what features are of linguistic relevance quite clearly in ordinary English. For example, one can say that an utterance requires a speaker and ordinarily at least one hearer. It may not be possible, as I pointed out above, to formalize the explanation of language use in the sense a grammar is formalized because of the properties, creativity and indeterminacy, which this distinctly different object of description has. It may have to be the object of a separate and quite different kind of theory.

To require the same primes repeats the mistake. The primes 'subject of' and speaker' or 'addressee' are quite distinct. The relationship between the prag-

matic primes and the syntactic ones will be 'interpretative', by analogy with interpretative semantics, and thus can make reference to linguistic primes and relations. Just as Chomsky (1972: 172) suggests rules which interprets the syntactic deep subject of a transitive verb of action as AGENT (a semantic prime) if it is animate, INSTRUMENT (another semantic prime) otherwise, the rule for imperatives suggested above interprets the syntactic surface subject as addressee just in case the main clause verb is non-finite. Clearly, however, other parts of a pragmatic theory will have to make reference to semantics, as noted above. This reflects the fact that the world obtrudes into the language system at a multiplicity

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of points. Note that the thematic organization of language in terms of focus and presupposition, also a discourse function, is determined by surface structure and requires surface interpretation (Halliday, I967; Chomsky, I972a).

What is of specific interest for the grammar is how specific constructions are more overtly compatible with the preconditions for a given illocutionary force and are therefore relatively non-opaque; in the English imperative case this is clearly a matter of surface form.

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