This article focuses on a non-canonical use of negation in historical and modern French, characterized by an apparent absence of meaning: expletive negation. In search of the lost meaning of expletive negation, via a diachronic investigation from Latin to French, we establish that expletive negation originates from prohibitive negation. We put forward an analysis of prohibitive negation within Krifka (2014)'s model of embedded speech-act and propose that expletive negation is the continuation of prohibitive negation, and that it is what remains of a long-gone embedded negative imperative in French. Along this line of analysis, the article brings historical evidence in favour of the hypothesis that languages can develop from speech-act embedding to proposition embedding. Our analysis of prohibitive negation as a clause-typing negation marker in Latin and as a verbal mood negation marker brings new evidence to the claim that sentential and verbal mood marking are two intimately related phenomena.

This paper investigates postverbal imperative subjects (e.g., get you to school), ungrammatical in standard English but grammatical in certain contexts in dialects of Scottish and Belfast English. Henry (1995) reports that unaccusative verbs generally allow postverbal subjects in Belfast English, but in the Scottish English (ScotE) dialect considered here, only a very restricted subset of verbs allow it. Moreover, in ScotE, the preposition away can appear without an overt verb (I’ll away to my bed); this also allows a postverbal subject in imperatives (away you to school). The ScotE data cast doubt on Henry’s (1995) proposal that the licensor of postverbal subjects is weak agreement. The paper argues that the subjects in these constructions are actually external arguments of small clauses (of which goal PPs are taken to be a subset following, e.g., Beck & Snyder 2001). The differences between dialects are located in the structure of resultatives; Belfast English allows Case to be assigned to the subject of small clauses in resultative constructions via a functional head endowed with a causation feature, allowing them to remain in situ in imperatives. In standard English, the causation feature is directly merged onto the verb, not allowing for Case assignment and forcing raising of the subject of the small clause. The ScotE data is argued to arise from the availability of a very ‘light’ verb which is realized as get in some contexts and as silence in others.

This article analyzes Russian aspectual usage in the imperative by combining Šatunovskij’s (2009) approach with Dickey’s (2018) cognitive linguistic theory of Russian aspect. It argues that the contrasting use of perfective and imperfective imperatives in mands for the completion of a single action can be explained in terms of the pragmatic mechanisms proposed by Šatunovskij (2009): perfective imperatives signal a request on the part of the speaker for the listener to make the decision to carry out the action, whereas imperfective imperatives make no such signal, because the decision has already been made. The latter occurs when the speaker knows or infers that the listener has already made the decision (or will do so if given the chance), or when the speaker has suspended the listener’s decision-making role and has gone ahead and made the decision. Various contextual uses of affirmative and negated imperatives and analyzes them in terms of the request or lack thereof for the listener to make the decision to carry out the action. The functions of the perfective and imperfective aspects in imperatives are argued to be instantiations of temporal definiteness and temporal indefiniteness (respectively). Inasmuch as this is true, Russian aspect codes alternative construals of time in non-finite usage as well as finite usage.

The prescriptive infinitive can be found in the North Germanic languages, is very old, and yet is largely unnoticed and undescribed. It is used in a very limited pragmatic context of a pleasant atmosphere by adults towards very young children, or towards pets or (more rarely) adults. It has a set of syntactic properties that distinguishes it from the imperative: Negation is pre-verbal, subjects are pre-verbal, subjects are third person and are only expressed by lexical DPs, not personal pronouns. It can be found in modern child language corpora, but probably originated before ad 500. The paper is largely descriptive, but some theoretical solutions to the puzzles of this construction are proposed.

This article deals with two syntactic differences between Present-Day Swedish (PDSw) and Early Modern Swedish (EMSw): first, only EMSw allows VS and XVS word order to occur in relative clauses; second, only EMSw permits non-verb-initial imperatives. One structural difference between the varieties is assumed to be a prerequisite for all these word order differences: the subject position was spec-TP in EMSw but is spec-FinP in PDSw. Only the lower position (spec-TP) is compatible with inversion (VS) and fronting of non-subjects (XVS) in relative clauses as well as with imperative clauses having elements other than the imperative verb in the initial position. To be able to account for the latter phenomenon, however, an additional assumption is needed: the imperative type-feature, [imp], always accompanies the verb in PDSw but is tied to an operator in EMSw. The first assumption about differing subject positions is independently motivated by findings already in the previous literature. The second assumption about the differing behaviour of [imp] in the two varieties is supported by the distribution of imperative verbs over a wider range of syntactic contexts in EMSw than in PDSw.