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A Government-Binding perspective on the imperative in English1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Frits Beukema  and
Peter Coopmans
Frits Beukema
Affiliation:
University of Leiden
Peter Coopmans
Affiliation:
University of Utrecht
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Extract

Culicover (1976:152) states that ‘the imperative is an idiosyncratic construction in most languages’. One of the aims of this article is to show that as far as this construction in the English language is concerned, this is an overstatement if we give careful consideration to the structural properties of this construction in a restrictive framework such as Government-Binding theory. Given the proposals in current generative grammar concerning the relations between COMP, INFL, V and their corresponding projections, it is worth investigating what the syntactic representation of the imperative may look like.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 25 , Issue 2 , September 1989 , pp. 417 - 436
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989

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References

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