Truth is undefined for imperative statements. However, if imperatives implicitly reference a fact, they can be rephrased as truth-valuable declaratives explicitly referencing that fact. But are there such facts? Kenny held that any imperative references a set of wishes held by its imperator. I extend his thesis by proposing that imperator wishes are facts implicitly referenced by imperatives an...

This experiment was designed to investigate whether the acoustic correlates of prosody of the pre-wh-part of the sentence differentiate in-situ-wh-questions from declaratives in Persian. To accomplish the purpose of this research 115 declaratives and 115 insitu-wh-questions were constructed. These sentences were elicited from eight Persian native speakers in a sentence elicitation task. The con...

This paper presents an account of the semantic content and conventional discourse effects of a range of sentence types in English, namely falling declaratives, polar interrogatives, and certain kinds of rising declaratives and tag interrogatives. The account aims to divide the labor between compositional semantics and conventions of use in a principled way. We argue that falling declaratives an...

Before talking about conditionalized imperatives, I want to ensure a common understanding of ‘imperative’, namely as a clause type in the sense of Sadock and Zwicky (1985). That means that for a given language L , imperative will be taken to denote one of L ’s form types at sentence level, namely the one tokens of which are prototypically used for REQUESTs or COMMANDs. As such they are parallel...

In many natural languages, there are clear syntactic and/or intonational differences between declarative sentences, which are primarily used to provide information, and interrogative sentences, which are primarily used to request information. Most logical frameworks restrict their attention to the former. Those that are concerned with both usually assume a logical language that makes a clear sy...

This study explored the relationship between articulator movement and prosody in children at different developmental ages. Jaw, lower lip, and upper lip kinematics were examined in 4-, 7-, and 11-year-old children as they produced the declarative and interrogative forms of utterances "Show Bob a bot" and "Show Pop a pot." Articulator movement differences were found between declaratives and inte...