Imperative Subject Deletion and Some Related Matters

It is generally agreed that English imperative sentences like 'Go home' have an underlying subject that is deleted in the derivation of the sentence. A question that has arisen in discussion of imperative sentences is whether the deletion of you is accomplished by a special rule applying only in imperatives or whether this is part of a more general phenomenon. It has been suggested that under the so-called performative analysis in which each sentence is represented in underlying structure with a performative 'hypersentence' (to use Sadock's useful term) that may be deleted, the deletion of you in imperatives is accomplished by the independently motivated rule of Equi NP Deletion, which is generally agreed to apply to the derivation of sentences like: I order you to go home. The explanatory value of this initially attractive suggestion is questioned; it is suggested that imperatives constitute a class of sentences that are formally peculiar in some respects. In Section 1 some curious facts about the deletion of imperative subjects suggesting that this deletion is not accomplished by Equi are reviewed. Section 2 presents in various languages additional formal imperative properties that do not appear to follow from a more general syntactic analysis. In Section 3 implications of these facts are discussed. Familiarity with the performative analysis & arguments for it is assumed throughout the discussion. D. Leffler