4 - The imperative is directive force

Summary

In Part I, we defined the imperative mood as a sentence type prototypically associated with the performance of directive speech acts. We also noted that characterising the imperative in this way does not amount to defining the imperative as encoding directive force. Nevertheless, it does not rule it out, either. In this chapter, we look closely at theories that do treat the imperative as encoding directive force. Put simply, according to these theories, the meaning of the imperative sentence just is directive force.

We will divide our survey of these theories into two main sections. The first will be devoted to models that, explicitly or implicitly, claim that the meaning of the imperative should be broken up into (at least) two components: a propositional content that determines which situation that imperative is ‘about’, and some other component, which encodes directive force. This way of thinking is perhaps the most traditional, and has its roots in Frege’s distinction between sense and force (see Recanati 2013). Another option is to reject this distinction, and to build a theory of imperatives as distinct semantic objects that consitute directive force. We will survey three such theories in the second part of this chapter.