please post (fwd)

[Kelley Sacco]

Post: From Jill Devilliers (jdevilli at email.smith.edu)

Dear Childes,

Dr Cabral wrote:
"Imperatives, even if they do not show an overt morpheme of person and
tense, carry their meanings:
The person referent is recovered when the sentence is uttered by
defaut/pragmatic processes: it always refers to the addressee, since we
cannot give an order to ourselves and it is useless to give it to somebody
about whom we are talking.
Past tense is excluded for the same pragmatic reasons."

With respect to this debate concerning the grammar of English imperatives,
may I suggest we consult a child? A clue to their structure lies in the tag
question. Many years ago when my son was three, it occurred to me that he
didn't produce tags yet, and as a student of Roger Brown, I felt the lack*.
So over the course of an afternoon, I "taught" him tags, by saying- "let's
play a game where we stick little questions on the end of everything we
say, OK? Like this 'You are funny, aren't you?' 'He can swim, can't he?'"
To cut a long story short, I got bored long before he did, and he wanted to
play forever. He made no errors. Much later I made some soup and shouted
along the hall to my spouse, "Come get your soup!" My son looked up and
said "won't you?" I don't think I've ever used such a polite imperative,
but I know it when I hear it. Pragmatics? Default?  I'd vote for plain old
grammar.

Jill de Villiers

*de Villiers, J.G. Faith, doubt and meaning. In F. Kessel, (ed) Development
of Language 	and Language Researchers. Hillsdale,N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates, 1988.


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