A preference semantics for imperatives

What it is about

A formal-semantics paper on what imperatives mean if they do not describe the world. It poses three challenges. Imperatives combine with declaratives under and and or while keeping their force («I'll make the chile and you make the tortillas!» commits the speaker to both parts). Their felicity depends on what is known («The door is open. Open the door!» is odd), and what a disjunctive command requires changes with new information («Take out the trash or wash the dishes!», then the trash turns out to be empty). And Ross's paradox: «Post the letter!» should not entail «Post the letter or burn it!». The proposal is a dynamic semantics in which a declarative adds information, an imperative adds a preference of one alternative over its complement, conjunction applies updates in sequence and disjunction splits the state into competing sub-states. Contrary imperatives make the preference state irrational rather than contradictory. The paper ends by separating a sentence's semantic force from what an utterance does: imperatives also suggest, advertise, wish and curse («Try the falafel!», «Have a nice day!», «Drop dead!»).

Ideas

• I1. Give imperatives a felicity check against what the reader already knows: an imperative whose content already holds in the remembered frames («The door is open. Open the door!»), or whose object was said not to exist, is flagged in prag/src/infer.rs with the frame that makes it odd. Such lines are candidates for a non-literal reading (insistence, sarcasm), which is where the absurdity matrix's trigger in world/src/domains.rs can meet them. Test with minimal pairs (state holds / does not hold).
• I2. Read a disjunction of imperatives as a choice between alternatives, and narrow the choice when a later frame makes one alternative done or impossible. This is a small rule over coordinated imperative Event frames in prag/src/frames.rs (keep both under one choice link). A course question like «What did the boy have to do in the end?» can then be answered from the narrowed choice.
• I3. Label acts per clause for mixed coordinations: «I'll make the chile and you make the tortillas» is a promise and a request in one sentence. Count such sentences in the silver (a coordinated imp clause next to a first-person future clause) to see whether one-act-per-sentence loses much, before changing the schema.
• I4. Map imperatives to acts by the verb and formula, not by form alone: the agreer rule P1 in prag/src/agree.rs (an imperative labelled narrate/assert/evaluate/other becomes request) should leave out wish and greeting formulae (have a nice day, sleep well, good luck to you), curses (drop dead, go to the devil) and try X suggestions. A closed list in prag/data/cues.tsv; measure act precision on silver imperatives.

For Mova

31. Speech acts §4 (sentence types and acts) and §9 (agreer rules), 33-implicature-and-presupposition.md §5 (Quantity, here generalized to imperatives), 21-clause-structure.md and 24-coordination-subordination.md for coordinated clauses of different types. Code: prag/src/infer.rs, prag/src/frames.rs, prag/src/agree.rs, prag/data/cues.tsv. Measures: minimal-pair tests; act precision on imperatives in prag eval.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.3765/sp.13.6

@article{starr2020preference,
  title = {{A preference semantics for imperatives}},
  author = {Starr, William B},
  journal = {Semantics and Pragmatics},
  year = {2020},
  doi = {10.3765/sp.13.6},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.13.6}
}

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