A quantitative investigation of the imperative-and-declarative construction in English
Name
Scontras&Gibson-IaD paper[1].pdf
Size
249.19 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
cf91c222daf141d281ff044e3466f30b
Author(s)
Scontras, Gregory
Gibson, Edward A.
Date Issued
December 2011
Journal
Language
Publisher
John Hopkins University Press
Citation
Scontras, Gregory, and Edward Gibson. “A Quantitative Investigation of the Imperative-and-declarative Construction in English.” Language 87.4 (2011): 817–829. Web.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
The imperative-and-declarative (IaD) construction in English (e.g. Study hard and you will pass the class) has two distinct readings: one that has the semantics of a conditional and additionally the meaning of an imperative, and one that has only the semantics of a conditional, with no imperative meaning. There are two general kinds of syntactic approaches in the literature for analyzing this construction: one that treats the two interpretations as underlyingly syntactically the same, and one that treats them as two distinct syntactic constructions. This short report presents the results of an acceptability-judgment experiment that was designed to inform the debate between the two kinds of approaches. The two types of IaDs were observed to behave differently with respect to two phenomena we evaluated, suggesting either that they should be treated as grammatically distinct, or that a theory that treats them as grammatically the same must give a pragmatic account of the differences. Furthermore, because the pattern of data that we observed was a statistical interaction between two factors—a pattern of data that is not detectable without quantitative measurements—the results provide compelling evidence for the need for quantitative evaluations of linguistic hypotheses.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2011.0079
