Imperatives and Commands

Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald is Professor and Research Leader (People and Societies of the Tropics) in the Cairns Institute, James Cook University, Australia. She has worked on descriptive and historical aspects of Berber languages and has published, in Russian, a grammar of Modern Hebrew (1990; second edition 2009). She is a major authority on languages of the Arawak family, from northern Amazonia, and has written grammars of Bare (1995, based on work with the last speaker who has since died) and Warekena (1998), plus A Grammar of Tariana, from Northwest Amazonia (Cambridge University Press, 2003), in addition to essays on various typological and areal features of South American languages.Her lengthy grammar, The Manambu Language from East Sepik, Papua New Guinea, was published by OUP in 2008. Other books include Classifiers: a Typology of Noun Categorization Devices (2000, paperback 2003), Language Contact in Amazonia (2002) and Evidentiality (2004, paperback 2006), all published by OUP. She is co-editor with R. M. W. Dixon of the OUP series Explorations in Linguistic Typology, the fifth volume of which, The Semantics of Clause Linking, appeared in 2009.

The book is very well equipped ... The main contribution of Aikhenvald's book ... is its descriptive side. The impressive overview it provides of the crosslinguistic variation and tendencies pertaining to imperatives and commands makes it a must for anyone interested in either of these two subjects. So, if you are interested, read Aikhenvald's book!

• 1. Setting the Scene ; 2. Imperatives Worldwide ; 3. How Imperatives are Special ; 4. Imperatives and Other Grammatical Categories ; 5. Negative Imperatives ; 6. Imperatives and Their Meanings ; 7. Imperatives Which do not Command ; 8. Imperatives in Disguise ; 9. Imperatives we Live by ; 10. Where do Imperatives Come From? ; 11. What can we Conclude? ; Appendix ; References ; Index of Authors ; Index of Languages, Linguistic Families, and Areas ; Index of Subjects