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In:Verb and Context: The impact of shared knowledge on TAME categories
Edited by Susana Rodríguez Rosique and Jordi M. Antolí Martínez
[IVITRA Research in Linguistics and Literature 34] 2023
► pp. 327–350

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The role of context in imperative form choice

 | The Ohio State University
 | The Ohio State University
Published online: 4 January 2023
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ivitra.34.14sch
Abstract
When languages have more than one dedicated imperative, the distinct forms often correspond to different person/number combinations. But what happens when there is variation between two forms for the same person/number combination, e.g. 2nd person singular? This chapter analyzes the competing 2sg imperatives in Brazilian Portuguese (BP), which illustrate this situation. BP permits this option in both affirmative and negative contexts, where the historical imperative tu form for 2sg alternates with the 3sg present subjunctive form used with the 2sg pronoun você (cf. Lamberti & Schwenter 2018). Through the multivariate analysis of an experimental survey, we argue that the variation between the two forms can be accounted for in terms of the semantic-pragmatic notion of presumed settledness (Hoff 2019), i.e. speaker confidence about how the future will unfold, and can be operationalized in terms of contextual characteristics such as markers of temporal immediacy and addressee specificity. More broadly, we suggest that these characteristics are relevant to accounting for contrasts between imperative forms across languages such as those with “delayed/deferred imperatives” (Aikhenvald 2014).
Keywords:
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Empirical study of BP imperatives
    • 2.1Method
    • 2.2Results-descriptive statistics
    • 2.3Results: Inferential statistics
    • 2.4Summary of the empirical study and an important caveat
  • 3.Presumed settledness
  • 4.Contributions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
References (31)
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Cited by one other publication

O’Neill, Prof. Dr. Paul
2024. Monoglossic ideologies and the two-way relationship between linguistics and language learning/teaching: idiosyncratic variation in Brazilian Portuguese and its challenges for usage-based teaching.. Ampersand ► pp. 100198 ff. DOI logo

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