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Optimizing the future: imperatives between form and function

Besides declaratives and interrogatives, most languages mark a sentence type labelled "imperative". In contrast to what is the case for declaratives and interrogatives, there exist no established ways of representing imperatives in any of the formal systems currently employed to study meaning or usage of natural language. Given the lack of a straightforward link to truth/information growth, imperatives are particularly interesting for the study of linguistic meaning at the form-function interface. Thus, the course aims at (i) an understanding of clause types in principle and (ii) a detailed account of imperatives. Having presented a cross-linguistic individuation of imperatives, I discuss various theories for the semantics of imperatives (introduction of speech act theoretic notions into semantics/speech act independent semantic objects of particular types/my own treatment in terms of modalized declaratives). Points of comparison include (i) the variety of functions found with imperatives, (ii) interaction with temporal modification, coordination and conditionals.