Imperative Clauses: An archaic CP? Elisa Di Domenico University of Siena, Italy didomenico@unisi.it 0.A fundamental peculiar property of human language (whose analogue, in the sense of Hauser-Chomsky-Fitch 2002, is probably attested in the language of the bees) is Displaced Reference(DR): (1) ' A message is displaced to the extent that the key features in its antecedent and consequences are removed from the time and place of transmission. A great deal of human speech is displaced in this sense.' [Hockett, 1958: 579]. What makes DR possible in human language? Can it be considered a result of evolution? 1.My proposal is that the Tense/Person marking found in the verb of Declarative Sentences is precisely the device employed to implement DR in human language. In order to be displaced, a sentence is related to the speech event along two basic coordinates. For me 'place' in (1) is not to be intended as a physical place of the Earth but rather as the set [speaker + hearer]. In Declarative Sentences, two basic features (Tense and Person) relate what is said to the speech event : While 1/2 Person and Non-Past Tense signal a coincidence of what is said and the speech event, 3rd Person and Past Tense signal a non- coincidence of what is said and the speech event. 2. As evidence for this idea I analyse a clause type, found in human language, which lacks both Tense/Person inflection and the possibility of being displaced: Imperative Clauses. In many languages Real Imperative verbs consist in a morphologically meagre form ( bare stem in Germanic (Platzack - Rosengren 1998), stem + thematic vowel in Romance (Zanuttini 1997) ) which doesn't show any Tense/Person indication, while eventually a number morpheme can be present. The imperative verb cannot be inflected for T/P either morphologically or syntactically (it is compatible only with a 2nd P feature and a non-past adverb), and no DR can be conveyed by ICs. A number of syntactic properties of ICs shed some light on their structure. ICs are typically subjectless, regardless of the language specific setting of the Null Subject Parameter. This is strengthened by the fact that the imperative verb (contrary to the indicative verb) co-occurs with a vocative without a co-referring pronoun (Moro 2002), and with the fact that in languages with subject clitics (such as Northern Italian dialects) a subject clitic can never appear in ICs. Although a syntactically active external argument is present in ICs (as shown by Beukema and Coopmans 1989) and although an overt subject can appear in ICs in all the languages under scrutiny (with a Focus or Topic interpretation) we can say that ICs are Null-Subject Parameter exempt, possibly because their subject is not in [Spec, IP]. In ICs, the Inflectional Layer is lacking (or inactive). There is another set of properties which I cluster together: a) the directive force contributed by the imperative verb cannot be negated [Han (2001): [Don't call ! = I require that you not call * I do not require that you call ] b) ICs cannot be questioned c) ICs cannot concern a modal verb d) ICs cannot be embedded. These properties indicate a lack of FinP (see also Platzack and Rosengren 1998). This is thus the structure I propose for ICs, assuming a fine-grained CP (Rizzi 1997) : (2) [ForceP [TopP [AddresseeP [FocP [VP...]]]]] . AddresseeP is the position where the Addressee feature shared by the imperative verb and the imperative subject is checked: the restriction to 2nd Person does not hold for objects. 3. The structure of ICs shown in (2), lacking FinP and IP, differs from the structure of Declarative Sentences where both projections are active (with IP possibly selected by Fin° [+Fin]). ICs might be thus considered an 'archaic' CP, a residue of a stage in which human language was more similar than now to animal language in not being able to convey DR, a possibility due to the appearance of FinP-IP. Both CPs survive in human language, as hypothalamus and cerebellum survive with cortex in the human brain. Besides the fact noticed in many sub-fields of linguistics, that the Tense/Agreement cluster is an area of difficulty (in aphasia, Friedmann-Grodzinsky 1997; in Specific Language Impairment, Rice, 1994; in Second Language Acquisition, Prevost-White 2000), if ontogenesis recapitulates phylogeny, we expect children to pass a stage where only non-finite clauses or imperatives are attested: which is indeed the case. References Beukema, F. - Koopmans, P. (1989), A Government- Binding perspective on the Imperative in English, Journal of Linguistics, 25: 417- 436. Friedmann, N.- Grodzinsky, Y. (1997), Tense and Agreement in Agrammatic Production: Pruning the Syntactic Tree, Brain and Language, 56: 397 - 425. Han, C.H. (2001), Force, negation and imperatives, The Linguistic Review, 18: 289- 325. Hauser, M.D.- Chomsky, N.- Fitch, W.T. (2002), The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve?, Science, 298: 1569- 1579. Hockett, C. F. (1958), A Course in Modern Linguistics, New York, The MacMillan Company Moro, A. (2002), Notes on Vocative Case: a case study in clause structure, Ms. Università "Vita- Salute" San Raffaele, Milano. Platzack, C. - Rosengren, I. (1998), On the subject of imperatives: A minimalist account of the imperative clause, The Journal of Comapartive Germanic Linguistics 1:177-224. Prévost, Ph. - White, L.(2000), Truncation and Missing Inflection in Second Language Acquisition, In Friedemann, M.A. and L. Rizzi (eds.), The Acquisition of Syntax, Longman Rice, M. L. (1994), Grammatical Categories of Children with Specific Language Impairments, In M.L. Rice - R.V. Watkins (eds.), Specific Language Impairments in Children,Baltimore, Brooks. Rizzi, L. (1997) Rizzi, L. (1997), The Fine Structure of the Left Periphery, in L. Haegeman (ed.), Elements of Grammar, Dordrecht, Kluwer. Zanuttini, R. (1997), Negation and clausal structure, Oxford, Oxford University Press.