Imperative sentences usually occur in speech acts such as orders, requests, and pleas. However, they are also used to give advice, and to grant permission, and are sometimes found in advertisements, good wishes and conditional constructions. Yet, the relationship between the form of imperatives, and the wide range of speech acts in which they occur, remains unclear, as do the ways in which semantic theory should handle imperatives. This book is the first to look systematically at both the data and the theory. The first part discusses data from a large set of languages, including many outside the Indo-European family, and analyses in detail the range of uses to which imperatives are put, paying particular attention to controversial cases. This provides the empirical background for the second part, where the authors offer an accessible, comprehensive and in-depth discussion of the major theoretical accounts of imperative semantics and pragmatics.

In everyday talk about language, we distinguish between what someone said and what they implied, or otherwise conveyed. This distinction has been carried over into theorising about language and communication, resulting in much debate about how the notion of what is said should be defined. Against the underlying assumption of these disputes, Nothing is Said argues that it is a mistake to import the notion of saying into our models of basic linguistic communication. Rather than belonging to our basic linguistic competence, the notion of saying is a reflective one resulting from a higher-order metacommunicative competence that is relatively late-developing. This competence allows us to reflect simultaneously on the form and content of an utterance, and hence characterise it as an act of saying. The study shows how this notion of saying can be accounted for without assuming that identifying what is said is a necessary step in basic utterance interpretation. The idea that linguistic interpretation relies on identifying what is said is deeply ingrained. Mark Jary considers the consequences for semantic and pragmatic theory of dropping this assumption, focusing on lexical pragmatics, scalar implicature, assertion, lying, and other topics that have received significant attention in the recent literature. The claims made are supported by reference to empirical data from experimental psychology.

Imperative sentences usually occur in speech acts such as orders, requests, and pleas. However, they are also used to give advice, and to grant permission, and are sometimes found in advertisements, good wishes and conditional constructions. Yet, the relationship between the form of imperatives, and the wide range of speech acts in which they occur, remains unclear, as do the ways in which semantic theory should handle imperatives. This book is the first to look systematically at both the data and the theory. The first part discusses data from a large set of languages, including many outside the Indo-European family, and analyses in detail the range of uses to which imperatives are put, paying particular attention to controversial cases. This provides the empirical background for the second part, where the authors offer an accessible, comprehensive and in-depth discussion of the major theoretical accounts of imperative semantics and pragmatics.