{"id":814,"date":"2010-08-20T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2010-08-20T08:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/elanguage.net\/blogs\/booknotices\/?p=814"},"modified":"2010-06-23T09:20:43","modified_gmt":"2010-06-23T07:20:43","slug":"imperative-clauses-in-generative-grammar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/?p=814","title":{"rendered":"Imperative clauses in generative grammar"},"content":{"rendered":"
Imperative clauses in generative grammar: <\/strong>Studies in honour of Frits Beukema. Ed. by Wim van der Wurff<\/strong>. (Linguistik aktuell\/Linguistics today<\/a> 103.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007. Pp. viii, 352. ISBN \u00a09789027233677<\/a>. $180 (Hb).<\/div>\n

Reviewed by Michael Alvarez-Pereyre<\/strong><\/a>, Sorbonne University<\/em><\/p>\n

Although the morphosyntax of the imperative was fairly well described by encyclopedic grammarians at the beginning of the twentieth century, the first attempts to account for it are usually attributed to early generativists. These first models, however, were simplistic, which prompted the emergence of more elaborate theories throughout the realm of generative linguistics. This volume presents current generative research that examines the imperative in a range of Germanic, Romance, and South Slavic languages.<\/p>\n

Wim van der Wurff\u2019s introduction offers an extensive overview of the major morphosyntactic issues addressed in studies of the imperative. His historical perspective, however, is undermined by the lack of clear school boundaries between the numerous authors quoted\u2014a reader unfamiliar with the field might believe a number of (now widely accepted) ideas and examples had come from the generative tradition, when they were originally meant to lambast generative models. However, it is to van der Wurff\u2019s credit that he is more interested in discussing the strength of the arguments\u2014which he does quite brilliantly\u2014than in labeling their authors.<\/p>\n

In \u2018On the periphery of imperative and declarative clauses in Dutch and German\u2019, Sjef Barbiers<\/strong> argues that a minimal morphosyntactic difference between the two languages accounts for the unequal distribution possibilities of their verbs. In \u2018Featuring the subject in Dutch imperatives\u2019, Hans Bennis<\/strong> makes the case for a specified feature for second person contained in the complementizer (C)-position in Dutch simple imperative sentences. In \u2018Clitic climbing in Spanish imperatives\u2019, Marcel den Dikken<\/strong> and Mariv\u00ed Blasco<\/strong> propose comparative and independent justifications for the hypothesis that Spanish simple imperatives are not marked for tense, in contrast with subjunctives.<\/p>\n

In \u2018Topics in imperatives\u2019, Hilda Koopman <\/strong>examines the contribution and interaction of several factors to explain object presence and position in Dutch imperatives and declaratives. In \u2018Embedded imperatives\u2019, Christer Platzack<\/strong> considers Old Scandinavian and its modern descendants and puts forward a set of structural requirements for embedded imperatives\u00a0 possible in a language. In \u2018How to say no <\/em>and don\u2019t<\/em>: Negative imperatives in Romance and Germanic,\u2019 Gertjan Postma<\/strong> and Wim van der Wurff examine a correlation between the absence of negated imperatives in certain languages and the fact that in most of these languages, an identical word serves as both anaphoric negator (e.g. no<\/em>) and sentence negator (e.g. not<\/em>).<\/p>\n

In \u2018Analysing word order in the English imperative\u2019, Eric Potsdam<\/strong> proposes to assimilate the syntax of inverted imperatives (e.g. Don\u2019t you help them<\/em>) with that of superficially similar polar interrogatives. \u2018On participial imperatives\u2019, by Johan Rooryck<\/strong> and Gertjan Postma, explores a set of Dutch participial clauses used as directives. In \u2018\u201cInverted\u201d imperatives\u2019, Laura Rupp<\/strong> advances an explanation of subject position variation in emphatic and negated imperatives. Finally, in \u2018Pronominal clitics and imperatives in South Slavic\u2019, Olga Mi\u0161eska<\/strong> Tomi\u0107<\/strong> offers a structural comparison of pronominal clitics in imperatives in Serbian\/Croatian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, and Slovenian. The book concludes with indexes of languages, names, and terms.<\/p>\n

It remains tenable that the most profound insights on imperative clauses have been proposed outside the framework of generative grammar. Also, such structuring parameters as intonation, gesture, and context, although increasingly mentioned in generative analyses, still deserve fuller treatment. However, no other school of thought has produced so many and such diverse morphosyntactic studies on what remains a (relatively) poorly-known linguistic object. This book presents a significant ongoing contribution to the field.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Imperative clauses in generative grammar: Studies in honour of Frits Beukema. Ed. by Wim van der Wurff. (Linguistik aktuell\/Linguistics today 103.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007. Pp. viii, 352. ISBN \u00a09789027233677. $180 (Hb). Reviewed by Michael Alvarez-Pereyre, Sorbonne University Although the morphosyntax of the imperative was fairly well described by encyclopedic grammarians at the beginning of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/814"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=814"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/814\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":815,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/814\/revisions\/815"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}