Don't Negate Imperatives! : Interpretability of Clause Type Features

Abstract

This paper investigates Zanuttini's (1997) generalization about the incompatibility between sentential negation and true imperatives and proposes issues that her generalization raises can be resolved by taking into account the scope relation between the imperative mood and negation. On the basis of Han's (1998) observation that the imperative mood necessarily takes scope over negation and that the reverse scope relation is impossible, it is argued that true imperative verbs carry a clause type feature encoding the imperative mood and that this feature must not be c-commanded by the sentential negation ; otherwise, the sentence fails to receive an appropriate interpretation.