On the Syntactic Condition for Embedded Imperatives

This paper aims to explore a necessary condition in syntax for imperatives to be embedded in natural languages, particularly in English and Korean. Platzack (2007) claims that embedded imperatives are allowed when a complementizer can be morphologically realized as a result of T-to-C movement with an imperative verb staying in as a low position as v and the complementizer is compatible with an imperative feature carried by the verb in v. Critically reviewing his analysis, we suggest (i) that imperatives are embeddable only when verb raising out of vP does not take place in syntax, and (ii) that some variations and restrictions found in languages with embedded imperatives can be attributed to language-specific properties, that is, different lexical properties of matrix predicates and complementizers. In particular, we demonstrate that the availability of embedded imperatives in English, recently reported by Crnič and Trinh (2008) but not easily explained by Platzack (2007), immediately follows from our suggestion that the absence of verb raising out of the vP area is a necessary condition to be met in syntax. The same syntactic condition is shown to hold true not only in Korean, Japanese and Chinese, all of which whether verb overtly raises out of vP is debatable in, but also in other languages such as Slovenian, Ancient Greek, and Modern High German that are known to allow embedded imperatives.