Spanish imperatives: syntax meets morphology

Abstract

Contrary to Rivero & Terzi's (1995) claim that morphological mood and logical mood correlate one-to-one in Spanish imperatives, verbs in imperative sentences in all dialects of Spanish have obligatory non-imperative morphology more often than not. For example, the morphology of the verb in the imperative hágalo ‘do it’ is not imperative but subjunctive. A satisfactory account of semantic, syntactic, and morphological mismatches in Spanish imperatives must appeal to a Morphology module of grammar; real explanation is beyond the reach of purely syntactic analysis.