The Syntax of Imperatives in English and Germanic : Word Order Variation in the Minimalist Framework

This informative book examines several aspects of the syntax of imperative clauses in English and in a variety of other Germanic languages in the context of the challenge that apparent optional movement poses for the Minimalist Program. At a more general level, the book engages in current debate on one of the key issues in syntactic theory - the motivation for displacement operations in natural language. This novel analysis of the Imperative construction in English and Germanic, arguing for variation in the position of the subject within the clause, engages with key issues in syntactic theory - what is the motivation for displacement in natural language and how can it deal with the problem posed by attested cases of optional movement? The book engages in particular with the debate on whether movement is strictly triggered by morphsyntactic factors or whether it may also be motivated by interpretative considerations, given the central role of such interfaces in the minimalist framework This volume examines several aspects of the syntax of imperative clauses in English and in a variety of other Germanic languages in the context of the challenge that apparent optional movement poses for the Minimalist Programme. English imperative clauses are characterized by a cluster of syntactic properties which have long presented a puzzle for linguistic theories like the generative framework (Chomsky 1957 to 1998).