1. PSEUDO-IMPERATIVES IN ENGLISH Characterization.

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1 Pseudo-imperatives: A Case Study in the Ascription of Discourse Relations Michael Franke Universiteit van Amsterdam, ILLC 28 th Annual Meeting DGfS Bielefeld, Characterization. 1. PSEUDO-IMPERATIVES IN ENGLISH Pseudo-Imperatives (PIs) (Clark, 1993) are compound sentences where a preceding imperative sentence is conjoined or disjoined with a subsequent declarative sentence. Do X, and Y will happen/be the case/be done. Do X, or Y will happen/be the case/be done Instantiations and Interpretations. Positive Interpretation: Request performance of X Close the window and I ll kiss you. Do X, and (hearer-)desirable Y will happen/be the case/be done. Close the window or I ll kill you. Do X, or (hearer-)undesirable Y will happen/be the case/be done. Negative Interpretation: Request forbearance from X Close the window and I ll kill you. Do X, and (hearer-)undesirable Y will happen/be the case/be done.? Close the window or I ll kiss you.? Do X, or (hearer-)desirable Y will happen/be the case/be done. Conjunction Disjunction X and Y X or Y Hearer undesirable Y Negative Positive Hearer desirable Y Positive Negative 1.3. The Problem with Pseudo-Imperatives. Pragmatic Asymmetry: (Q1) Why can mean Don t do X! given appropriate instantiation of Y? (Q2) Why can not mean Don t do X! however Y is instantiated? (Q3) Why are instantiations of Y in pragmatically infelicitous in case Y cannot be interpreted as denoting an undesirable state of affairs for the addressee? 2.1. Translating English PIs into Japanese. 2. PSEUDO-IMPERATIVES IN JAPANESE? Conjunctive PIs were translated as conditionals by all of my informants: (1) a. Close the window and I ll kiss you. b. mado-wo shime-reba chuu-shi-te age-ru. window-acc close-cond kiss-do-part give-fin If you close the window, I will kiss you. (2) a. Close the window and I ll kill you. 1

2 2 b. mado-wo shime-reba korosu. windowacc close-cond kill-fin If you close the window, I will kill you. Disjunctive PIs were translated with the adverbial samonaito (otherwise) or an equivalent thereof: (3) a. Close the window or I ll kill you. b. mado-wo shime-ro. samonaito koros-u. window-acc close-imp otherwise kill-fin Close the window! Otherwise I ll kill you. 3. FORCE SUBORDINATION AND FORCE COORDINATION 3.1. A Force Coordination Account for PIs. The Japanese translation of English PIs suggests that the notion of a force coordinating connection may explain the noted pragmatic asymmetry. Definition: Let S and S be two sentences. A connection C is force coordinating if the occurrences of S and S in C(S,S ) are associated with the illocutionary force that S and S are associated with in isolation. A connection C is force subordinating, if it is not force coordinating. We call a force subordinating connection C left-force subordinating if C(S,S ) is associated with the illocutionary force of S. Similarly, right-force subordinating. Examples: Juxtaposition is force coordinating, but English if... then is not: (4) a. I promise to kiss Sally. She smiles. b. If I promise to kiss Sally, she smiles. Juxtaposition is force coordinating, but English and may be not: (5) a. Close the window! I will kill you. b. Close the window and I will kill you. The Japanese translations of disjunctive PIs (3) with adverbial samonaito are examples of force coordinating connections. Force Coordination Account (FCA): English conjunction and in PIs is left-force subordinating, whereas English disjunction or in PIs is force coordinating. Explanation of the Pragmatic Asymmetry: Disjunctive PIs (6a) are analyzed as a speech-act pair (6b) and (6c). (6) a. Do X, or Y will happen/be the case/be done. b. Do S! c. If you don t do X, Y will happen/be the case/be done. A (hearer-)desirable Y yields a speech-act pair which is incongruous with respect to the associated speaker intentions: (7b) is an inducement, (7c) is a deterrent. (7) a.? Close the window or I ll kiss you. b. Close the window! c. If you do not close the window, I ll kiss you. This boils down to treating (6a) as Do X! Because else Y where the discourse relation expressed by because applies on the level of the epistemic minimal unit or the illocution (Pasch et al., 2003) and should therefore be translated with German Sonst... nämlich Empirical Evidence for FCA. Conditional Readings of and as in (8) are discussed by Culicover and Jackendoff (1997) where they are characterized as having/being: conditional-like interpretations

3 coordinate in syntactic structure (arguments from extraction) subordinate in conceptual structure (arguments from binding) (8) a. Jason only smiles at another girl and Mary becomes jealous. b. One more beer and Jason falls off his chair. c. Close the window and I ll kill you. Examples of Force-Coordinating or can also be found (9), but this use of or is, though asymmetric, not subordinate in conceptual structure according to Culicover and Jackendoff. (9) a. You have to close the window, or the cat escapes. b. (?) I order you to close the window, or I ll kill you. c. (?) I promise to be late, or you may hit me Conceptual Plausibility of FCA. Conditional Readings of and might be explained as a modal subordination phenomenon (Roberts, 1989) in the framework of van Rooij (2005). If we assume that forceless imperatives are possibility statements (cf. Schwager, 2005) and that the second conjunct contains a (possibly covert) universal modal, then, using dynamic conjunction, we find that a statement of the form p q is true in a pointed model M,w iff all p-worlds accessible from w are q-worlds. Force Coordinating or however remains speculative at present from a conceptual point of view Problems with FCA. False Positives: Force coordinating because else can be used to explain why a presented possibility is not preferred, but or cannot. (10) a. It would be unfortunate, if John came as well. Because else we d have much more cake for ouselves. b.? It would be unfortunate, if John came as well, or we d have much more cake for ouselves. (11) a. Es wäre bedauerlich, wenn Johan auch käme. Sonst bleibt nämlich mehr Kuchen für uns. b.? Es wäre bedauerlich, wenn Johan auch käme, oder es bleibt nämlich mehr Kuchen für uns. Unclear Negatives: Force coordination cannot be summoned to account for the desirability bias in English simple present conditional-like uses of disjunction: (12) a. Jason leaves soon or Mary will be sad. b.? Jason stays until late or Mary will be happy. For reasons of systematicity, we d preferably treat and and or alike. Missing conceptual plausibility for force coordinating disjunction PIS AND INFORMATION STRUCTURE Force Coordination Maybe not Necessary We can account for the pragmatic asymmetry of PIs with left-force subordinating or drawing on intuitions about information packaging Against Asymmetrically Coordinated or. Culicover and Jackendoff (1997) s argument for subordination of and and against subordination of or in conceptual structure builds on binding phenomena (13a,b) and licensing of free choice any (13c): (13) a. Put another picture of himself i on the wall and/*or John i will get upset.

4 4 b. Give him i enough bribes and/*or every senator i will vote for the president s proposal. c. Say anything and/*or I ll call the police. But the infelicity of disjunctions in (13) seems of a different origin: There are parallel binding examples where disjunction is feasible: (14) a. Noch ein Bild von sich i an der Wand und Johan i rastet aus. b. Ein Plakat von sich i an jeder Wand oder Johan i ist gekränkt. c. Steck ihm i genug Geld zu und jeder i ist korrumpierbar. d. Steck ihm i genug Geld zu oder niemand i ist korrumpierbar. Use of free choice any in conditionals is subject to rhetorical constraints (Lakoff, 1970): (15) a. If you eat any loxo, I ll {batter you/??give you whatever you like.} b. If you eat some loxo, I ll {?batter you/give you whatever you like.} 4.2. An IS-Account of the Pragmatic Asymmetry. Disjunction, Conditionals and Relational Topicality: A conditionally read disjunction X or Y is semantically equivalent with a conditional If not X, then Y. A conditionally read disjunction X or Y differs from a conditional If not X, then Y in information structure. Following Haiman (1978) I assume that the relational topic, that to which the logical predicate applies, in a conditional If not X, then Y is the protatis not X. For conditionally read disjunctions X or Y the relational topic is the first disjunct X. I assume that, in PIs, the first conjunct or disjunct sets a relational topic only, i.e. the set of X-worlds is selected as contextually salient. PIs address the (implicit) question What about X?. They evaluate X, or X worlds and present X or X worlds as preferable. But then it transpires that we can single out disjunctive PIs as a misleading strategy of information conveyance, as here, and only here, X worlds are evaluated and presented as preferred, leaving open the question why, for (hearer-)desirable Y, the speaker set out to talk about X in the first place. POS-AND POS-OR EVAL X X X X EVAL EVAL X X X X EVAL NEG-AND NEG-OR

5 5 5. OPEN ENDS - BEST OF Is is legitimate to speak of force coordination? Should we rather refer to force isolation? Or is all this just a matter of discourse segmentation? Can the given plausibility account be embedded in an established/formal theory of information structure? Are PIs really syntactically coordinate? In Pasch et al. (2003) s classification, we might want to classify the imperative clauses as Einbettungen, were it not for the resulting violation of the topicality constraints associated with Einbettungen. Three out of three applicable tests of Asher and Vieu (2005) characterize PIs as leftsubordinate constructions (on what level?). But these tests might interfere badly with modal subordination phenomena. ERENCES Asher, N. and Vieu, L. (2005). Subordinating and coordinating discourse relations. Lingua, 115: Clark, B. (1993). Relevance and pseudo-imperatives. Linguistics and Philosophy, 16: Culicover, P. W. and Jackendoff, R. (1997). Semantic subordination despite syntactic coordination. Linguistic Inquiry, 28(2): Haiman, J. (1978). Conditionals are topics. Language, 54: Lakoff, R. (1970). Some reasons why there can t be any some-any rule. Language, 45: Pasch, R., Brauße, U., Breindl, E., and Waßner, U. H. (2003). Handbuch der deutschen Konnektoren. de Gruyter, Berlin, New York. Roberts, C. (1989). Modal subordination and pronominal anaphora in discourse. Linguistics and Philosophy, 12: Schwager, M. (2005). Exhaustive imperatives. In Dekker, P. and Franke, M., editors, Proceedings of the 15th Amsterdam Colloquium, pages van Rooij, R. (2005). A modal analysis of presupposition and modal subordination. Journal of Semantics, 22: