Exploring rhetorical imperatives in Catalan and German
Josep Ausensi, Sebastian Buchczyk
June 2025 

We draw the attention to an understudied class of imperatives in Catalan and German that we call rhetorical imperatives, following Ihara and Asano (2020), since the speaker does not actually order the addressee to carry out the directive. Rhetorical imperatives have a sarcastic interpretation as they are uttered when the speaker wants to call the addressee’s attention to an action they just carried out that has affected the speaker. We propose rhetorical imperatives constitute a natural subclass as they present anti-imperative properties which set them apart from canonical imperatives. In order to predict their licensing conditions, we propose that rhetorical imperatives follow from a reaction to a norm breach that are reflected through inconsistent commitments (Geurts 2019).

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/009071 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	To appear in Expressive meaning and speech acts. Edited by M.Teresa Espinal and Xavier Villalba. Leiden: Brill.
keywords:	imperatives, normative pragmatics, commitments, sarcasm, catalan, german, semantics
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