36.1819, Books: The atoms of imperatives: de Villiers (2025)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-36-1819. Wed Jun 11 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.1819, Books: The atoms of imperatives: de Villiers (2025)

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Date: 10-Jun-2025
From: Jan Martin [lotdissertations-fgw at uva.nl]
Subject: The atoms of imperatives: de Villiers (2025)


Title: The atoms of imperatives
Subtitle: Case studies from Afrikaans
Series Title: LOT Dissertation Series
Publication Year: 2025

Publisher: Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics / Landelijke
(LOT)
           http://www.lotpublications.nl/
Book URL: https://dx.medra.org/10.48273/LOT0692

Author(s): Engela de Villiers

Paperback
ISBN: 978-94-6093-477-3
Pages: 241
€37.00

Abstract:

Back cover text for The Atoms of Imperatives: Case Studies from
Afrikaans (Engela de Villiers):
This dissertation probes the formal features—the imperative atoms of
the title—that define imperative clauses in Afrikaans, a significantly
understudied language. Its two core objectives are: (i) to provide a
detailed empirical description of selected imperative and
imperative-like structures in Afrikaans, and (ii) to identify the
formal features that characterise Afrikaans imperatives and present a
minimalist generative analysis demonstrating the value of a
multifunctional feature system.
Three formal features are proposed that serve as the atoms of
imperatives: [participant], [modal], and [polarity]. In addition to
encoding the core properties of imperatives, these features can be
further extended to account for non-canonical imperatives and
speaker-/hearer-oriented elements not specific to imperatives. The
dissertation’s main theoretical contribution is to demonstrate how a
judiciously selected set of formal features can be maximally leveraged
to account for a variety of related and unrelated empirical phenomena.
This central point is illustrated on the basis of three case studies.
The first investigates two forms of negative imperatives, which
clearly illustrate the core functions of the atoms. The analysis is
then extended to directive declaratives—structures that have the
function of imperatives, but not the form. The second case study
explores three types of pseudo-let imperatives, which have the form of
imperatives, but not the function. Finally, the third case study
extends the analysis to a domain that initially seems unrelated to
imperatives: sentential particles. Three particle-types are
distinguished and their speaker-/hearer-related functions are analysed
by means of the imperative atoms.

Linguistic Field(s): Syntax

Subject Language(s): Afrikaans (afr)

Language Family(ies): Afrikaans based




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