One More Step and You’ll get Pseudo-Imperatives Right

Abstract

We consider pseudo-imperatives like Come near (and) I’ll show you, which have a conditional interpretation (‘if you come near, I’ll show you’). We show that they have basically the same semantics as Sufficiency Modal Constructions studied by von Fintel and Iatridou (2007). We provide a detailed analysis of ‘sufficiency’ in Lewis’s counterfactual framework, extending the analysis to pseudo-declaratives. We discuss the possible origins of the construction and offer a characterisation of the syntax-semantics interface.