Decomposing force

This paper proposes that the semantics of imperative clauses is not correlated with a unique morpho-syntactic (imperative) Force feature (as traditionally assumed), but can be derived from finer grained components, which are independently needed, such as a Modality feature and a 2nd Person feature. These features are shown to be instrumental for explaining not only the formal properties of true imperatives, but also of surrogate ones. Assuming several finer grained features rather than a unique Force feature offers a useful framework for characterizing both the similarities and the differences between the various types of imperatives.