Expressive contexts and descriptive subjects of Spanish imperatives

Abstract

Imperative clauses in various languages can be used to express the speaker’s wish exclusively, either without addressing the addressee or even in the absence of one. The speaker-bouletic use of imperatives has generally been assumed to exist universally. The current work provides novel empirical data from Spanish that show a complex felicity condition related to the imperatives in expressive contexts. Spanish imperatives can be truly speaker-bouletic only if the imperative subject fails to refer to a particular individual in the context, but rather is associated with a set of objects that share a homogeneous property. Building on Kaufmann (2012), we argue for the necessity of including a subject-dependent element in the denotationof imperatives and an additional presuppositional restriction related to the subject.