Being relatively imperative in Slovenian

Abstract

Imperatives in relative clauses are crosslinguistically very rare, but occur in Slovenian with both non-restrictive and restrictive relatives. Interestingly, restrictive imperative relative clauses in Slovenian impose requirements on the contextual settings and on possible relative clause heads that other relative clauses are not subject to. We derive these restrictions by combining independently motivated assumptions about imperatives and relative clauses. Specifically, presuppositions associated with imperatives are predicted to result in infelicity unless the gap in the relative clause is associated with an entity already established in the previous discourse.