Jary and Kissine examine the meaning of imperative sentences, taking the existing relevance-theoretic semantic analysis, in terms of the desirability and potentiality of the described state of affairs, as their point of departure. In their view, a complete account of the interpretation of imperatives has to explain how they can result in the addressee forming an intention to perform an action, and this requires the theory to make room for ‘action representations’ (in addition to factual representations, such as assumptions). They claim that the imperative form is uniquely specified to interface with such action representations.

This chapter presents an examination of the Korean sentence-final suffix ci. The analysis developed here by Eun-Ju Noh builds on a body of work in relevance theory on discourse markers or particles – these are typically non-compositional elements of linguistic form that do not affect propositional content, but rather indicate something about the speaker’s attitude towards or evidence for that proposition. With regard to ci, Noh argues that existing treatments of it as an epistemic or attitudinal marker are unable to account for the full range of cases, and that it is better analysed as a metarepresentational marker indicating that the propositional form represents not a state of affairs in the world but rather the speaker’s own representation of that state of affairs.