The Use and Interpretation of Overt Imperative Subjects in English

The Use and Interpretation of Overt Imperative Subjects in English

  As has been observed time and again in the literature, the absence of an overt subject is the unmarked case vis-？-vis the presence of one in English imperatives, and where an imperative does occur with an overt subject, it is with good reason--i.e., to serve some communicative purpose. In this paper, I argue that the various ways in which overt imperative subjects are used and interpreted can be reduced to two basic discourse-pragmatic functions. The first function, which I shall label "informational," can be summed up as follows: The subject of an imperative must occur overtly when it represents part of the most important information in the utterance. The second function, which I shall call "emotive," draws on Kamio’s (1997) theory of territory of information; in brief, the overt presence of a second-person pronominal subject signals the speaker’s territorial claim on the information conveyed in the given imperative, which in turn tinges the utterance with an authoritative overtone. The arguments put forward in this paper will show that overt imperative subjects do not occur at random but rather in strict accordance with discourse and pragmatic principles.