Permalink : http://hdl.handle.net/2115/5764

This paper discusses and-conditional imperatives, or sometimes called "pseudoimperatives" -- coordinate sentences in which the first conjunct is an imperative, the second conjunct a declarative, and the two are conjoined by and, as in Bring alcohol to school and youʼll be suspended. I argue that the and-conditional imperative sentence is not an isolated construction as is commonly assumed but is best analyzable in terms of higher-level leftsubordinating and construction (cf. Culicover and Jackendoff 1997, 2005), occupied by an example of non-prototypical imperative, a variant of imperative lacking strong command force. It is shown that the relevance-theoretic analysis of "pseudo-imperatives" by Clark (1993), who treats the imperative as an "ordinary imperative" and and as a truth-functional connective reducible to a logical symbol, falls short of providing a detailed characterization. In addition, this analysis does not yield a principled account of a variety of syntactic and semantic phenomena known to peculiar to and-conditional imperatives; included are the ability to refer to past situations,the semantic impact of emphatic attitudinal items,as well as the felicitous appearance of negative polarity items as well as stative predicates. In contrast, the construction-based approach of the present paper, it is argued, not only offers a fuller characterization of the and-conditional imperative construction but also neatly handles these seemingly disparate data in a unified manner, without relying heavily on pragmatic considerations.