The Syntax of Imperatives

Asier Alcázar is Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of Missouri. His research interests include generative syntax and its interfaces with semantics and morphology, corpus linguistics and typology. Mario Saltarelli is Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Southern California. He specialises in general linguistics and researches the synchronic and diachronic morphology-phonology and syntax-semantics interface.

'This book opens a so far unexplored space: the context-sensitivity of narrow syntax. It successfully shows that the syntactic formalization of notions such as Speaker and Addressee are necessary to provide a deeper understanding of the nature of grammar. The authors draw a fascinating picture of how a syntactic theory can incorporate and represent indexicality.' Alessandra Giorgi, Ca' Foscari University, Italy

• 1. Introduction; 2. Imperatives across languages; 3. Foundations for an analysis of the imperative clause; 4. The syntax of imperative clauses: a performative hypothesis; 5. Basque allocutive agreement; 6. Conclusion.