Back cover text for The Atoms of Imperatives: Case Studies from Afrikaans (Engela de Villiers):
This dissertation probes the formal features—the imperative atoms of the title—that define imperative clauses in Afrikaans, a significantly understudied language. Its two core objectives are: (i) to provide a detailed empirical description of selected imperative and imperative-like structures in Afrikaans, and (ii) to identify the formal features that characterise Afrikaans imperatives and present a minimalist generative analysis demonstrating the value of a multifunctional feature system.
Three formal features are proposed that serve as the atoms of imperatives: [participant], [modal], and [polarity]. In addition to encoding the core properties of imperatives, these features can be further extended to account for non-canonical imperatives and speaker-/hearer-oriented elements not specific to imperatives. The dissertation’s main theoretical contribution is to demonstrate how a judiciously selected set of formal features can be maximally leveraged to account for a variety of related and unrelated empirical phenomena.
This central point is illustrated on the basis of three case studies. The first investigates two forms of negative imperatives, which clearly illustrate the core functions of the atoms. The analysis is then extended to directive declaratives—structures that have the function of imperatives, but not the form. The second case study explores three types of pseudo-let imperatives, which have the form of imperatives, but not the function. Finally, the third case study extends the analysis to a domain that initially seems unrelated to imperatives: sentential particles. Three particle-types are distinguished and their speaker-/hearer-related functions are analysed by means of the imperative atoms.
