Abstract

The imperative construction has received little attention within the syntactic tradition of Govemment and Binding Theory and the Minimalist Program. Where it is discussed, it is assumed to have an impoverished structure, which is claimed to account for its syntactic ,misbehavior'. This paper intends to show that these approaches are in need of revision. A universal process of imperative verb raising is shown to apply in all languages in which a syntactically determined imperative sentence type is attested, yielding a specific, uniform imperative structure. As a consequence of this raising, the verb is enabled to license overt subjects as weil as the canonical covert subjects, but disabled to cooccur with certain negative elements. The functional head in which the verb ultimately lands is responsible for the correspondence between the imperative morphology and logico-syntactic modality.