English imperative sentences

The fullest account of English imperative sentences considered in the context of a transformational grammar is contained in Katz & Postal (1964: 74_9).1 Their account forms part of a discussion of the general thesis that transformations do not affect the meaning of sentences, and of the proposal that follows as a natural corollary of this thesis, that the set of optional singulary transformations be restricted to those usually referred to as 'stylistic' transformations. Instead of treating imperative sentences as derived from declarative kernels, therefore, they postulate the occurrence of an imperative morpheme (Imp) in the underlying phrase-markers of imperative sentences. This, they assume, marks these structures as the domain of the imperative transformations and imposes certain selectional restrictions upon them. The notion of the Imp morpheme, which is the most original and most important part of Katz and Postal's analysis of imperative sentences, is adopted in this paper and the occurrence of the morpheme in the deep-structure of all imperative sentences is assumed throughout it. In the rest of their analysis, however, Katz and Postal draw upon more traditional ideas, one of which is disputable. The idea that the second person pronoun (you) enters into the structure of all imperative sentences in English is at least as old as Bullokar (I586: 26) and seems to have been accepted by most grammarians since that time. Jespersen (1940: 468) states that 'The proper sphere of the imperative is the second person (singular or plural)'. Sweet (I960: iii) is no less categorical: 'As the imperative can be used only in addressing someone, the subject of an imperative sentence must always be in the second person.' Since both writers assume that only pronouns have a second person form they conclude that the subject of imperatives is always you. This provides them with a basis for their explanation of the short form of the imperative (Come!), that is, that in these cases the subject you is 'understood', not needing actually to be marked because it is the only possible subject.