- Email: [email protected]
Imperatives
280
Book reviews
This approach gives the author's dualistic pragmatic model (appealing to R- and Q-principles) wide explanatory value and provides evidence of the influence of pragmatic factors on language structure building. This evidence strongly supports the author's arguments for a reinforced functional/pragmatic component paired with a rather simple semantic component. References Anscombre, Jean-Claude and Oswald Ducrot, 1983. L'argumentation clans la langue. Bruxelles: Mardaga. Anscombre, Jean-Claude and Oswald Ducrot, 1986. Argumentativit6 et informativit6. In: M. Meyer, ed., De la m6taphysique ~i la rh6torique, 79-94. Bruxelles: Editions de rUniversit6 de Bruxelles. Bartsch, R., 1973. 'Negative Transportation' gibt es nicht. Linguistische Berichte 27: 1-7. Barwise, Jon and Robin Cooper, 1981. Generalized quantifiers in natural language. Linguistics and philosophy 4: !59-219. Ducrot, Oswald, 1980. Los 6chelles argumentatives. Paris: l.,¢s Editions de Minuit. Engel, Pascal, 1989. La norme du vrai. Philosophie de la logique. Paris: Gallimard. Fauconnier, Gilles, 1975. Pragmatic scales and logical structure. Linguistic Inquiry 6(3): 353-375. Horn, Laurence, 1984. Toward a new taxonomy for pragmatic inference: Q-based and R-based implicature. In: D. Schiffrin, ed., Meaning, form and use in context: Linguistic applications, 11-42. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Horn, Laurence, 1988. Pragmatic theory. In: F. Newmeyer, ed., linguistics: The Cambridge survey, Vol. 1,113-145. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jackendoff, Ray, 1985. Semantics and cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Jespersen, Otto, 1917. Negation in English and other languages. Copenhagen: A.F. Host of Son. Leech, Geoffrey, 1981. Pragmatics and conversational rhetoric. In: H. Parret et al., eds., Possibilities and limitations of pragmatics, 413-442. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Sommers, Fred., 1982. The logic of natural language. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Sperber, Dan and Deirdre Wilson, 1986. Relevance. Communication and cognition. London: Blackwell.
C.L. Hamblin, Imperatives. Oxford: Basil Biackwell, 1987. 262 pp. US $45.00. Reviewed by Dominique Boulonnais*
HamLlin's book is one in a series of attempts to bring what philosophers call 'imperatives' within the fold of logic. Underlying such endeavours is the claim that imperatives need not, and indeed should not, be rejected from the subject matter of logic because they cannot be accounted for directly within the frameworks normally used for indicatives, such as truth-conditional semanticsa point of view defended earlier by philosophers like Carnap (1947) and now increasingly, but by no means universally, abandoned in practice. * Correspondence address: Dominique Boulonnais, Universit6 de Paris III - Sorbonne Nouvelle, 5 Rue de rEcole-de-M6decine, 75006 Pads, France.
Book reviews
281
Philosophers have traditionally opposed imperatives to indicatives (questions being more often than not treated as a minor category reducible to either of the other two, generally imperatives). In his first chapter, however, Hamblin refuses to provide the reader with a ready-made definition of what he means by imperatives so as to avoid begging the question of their theoretical status; instead he prefers to construct an extensional description of the set of elements he purports to study and to adopt the method of case law. His first category, which he calls 'imperatives proper', includes both 'wilful imperatives', i.e. commands, requests and demands, and 'non wilful imperatives', such as advice, suggestions or instructions. Also discussed are a number of borderline cases, like invitations, and 'stragglers', in particular wishes. In this first category are included both imperative locutions and their grammatical substitutes. The second category is made up of 'permissives', i.e. imperative locutions which are to be understood as containing a conditional of the form /f you wish. Finally, his third category contains what he calls 'paraimperatives', defined as utterances which should not count as imperative in the sense that they do not possess all the characteristics of imperatives and are normally not expressed ~:hrough imperative locutions, but which are nevertheless concerned with action. In this last category we find undertakings, which are first person (as opposed to second or third person imperatives), plans, which are said to be 'forceless', or intentions, which correspond to mental states. Chapter two proceeds, still without a definition, to explore the grammar and logic of imperatives. It deals with a number of well-known grammatical, or as Hamblin sees it pragmatic, features of imperatives in English, such as the restrictions concerning stativity, tense and subject, as well as with the semantic values that obtain for negation in imperative sentences. Hamblin also shows that the traditional operators of logic, such as those which are to be found in conjunctions, disjunctions or conditionals, are also present in imperative sentences, thus confirming the view that the latter constitute a natural domain of study for logic. In chapter three, Hamblin explores three attempts that have been made to derive imperatives from indicatives through a process of reduction (Russell, 1940, being apparently the only philosopher to have suggested the reverse, i.e. that all indicatives should be derived from sentences of the form Know that p). The first of these attempts consists in deriving imperatives from You will p sentences, the second from You should p sentences and the third from performatives such as I order you p (or other similar forms). All these approaches are criticized with the aim of pointing out that imperatives require a different logical treatment from that of indicatives expressing prediction, moral statements and explicit performativity. Also rejected as an attempt to assimilate imperatives to indicatives is Hare's approach based on an illocutionary operator expressing force, which would
282
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allow logicians to treat the informative, or propositional, part of sentences, exclusively, as the subject of a logic of imperatives. For Hamblin imperatives require a treatment in their own fight, which would give a comprehensive account of their meaning and use. In order to do this, he has devised a model of what he calls 'action-state semantics'. This is divided into two parts. The first part, which is aimed at describing the basic contert of imperatives, defined as the set of worlds in which the imperative can be considered as satisfied, covers essentially the same ground as informative treatments of imperatives, but within the framework of model-theoretic semantics, whereas the second part deals with the specific aspects of satisfaction, or action-reduction, which characterizes imperatives and distinguishes them from indicatives independently of their individual force. To accommodate imperatives, Hamblin notably stresses the necessity of introducing into traditional possible worlds semantics such notions as a time-scale and distinctions between actions and states and physical and mental possibility, along with features such as intentionality (expressed here through the concept of a strategy). Chapter five investigates the consistency of a set of imperatives. It deals in particular with various sets of conflicting imperatives, like quandaries, i.e. situations in which an agent cannot act without infringing some other imperative, antagonisms, which are inconsistencies on the part of the issuer(s), such as Go out and win! issued by a coach to two adversaries in a game of tennis, and finally obstructed permissions, like clashes between permissions and prohibitions. Chapter six contains a brief incursion into the domain of ability and knowledge, as distinct from that of possibility and choosability explored in chapter four. Ability is analyzed as para-imperative, and an attempt is made to describe the way it interacts with the logic of imperative sentences. In the last chapter, Hamblin tries to introduce a logic of dialogue, or dialectic as he prefers to call it, to handle the pragmatics of imperatives. The force of imperatives, whether they are to be understood as requests, orders or advice for instance, is said to be a function of their use in particular contexts and, as such, to require a separate treatment over and beyond that given to their basic meaning in chapter four. Hamblin only gives us a brief example of what such a logic of dialogue would look like, with a model of the interaction between imperatives and questions, in which he introduces the concept of commitment. Finally the account of the book given above would not be complete without a mention of the formalization, which is always provided whenever it is needed, and of the unusually large number of examples used to illustrate the various points at issue. This, along with its lightness of tone and numerous incursions into such fields as law, ethics and general philosophy, makes the book not only highly readable, but also surprisingly enjoyable.
Book reviews
283
However, if Hamblin's work is indeed meant as an improvement over earlier logical treatments of imperative sentences in the sense that it deals with both satisfaction and force, and not only with propositional content, there are still a number of questions which are difficult to evade, the most fundamental of which have to do with the relation that such studies have with natural language and the vision of natural language they promote. The first of these questions concerns what the author purports to describe in such a study. 'Imperative', in the acceptation retained here, is just another word for what could be called 'the language of action', an expression used sporadically throughout the book. Sentences are divided between the language of action and the language of description. The latter is made up of 'indicative sentences' (sometimes also called 'declaratives'), which have traditionally been considered as the only legitimate subject matter of logic. Contrary to indicatives, which form a rather homogeneous class of 'locutions', the language of action, as Hamblin describes it, is a mixture of linguistic forms. It contains true imperatives, but also declarative sentences of the descriptive and performative kinds whose meaning can be accounted for in terms of action-reduction. We are thus presented with a set of sentences the existence of which is solely justified by the claim that all the elements it contains are amenable to a treatment involving the notion of satisfaction. Admittedly, sets function differently from categories in that they are in no need of independent justification. A linguistic theory which would want to analyse, say, TO as a complementizer would need external evidence, morphological or syntactic, showing that it belongs to the same category as FOR and THAT. Barfing the existence of such empirical confirmation, there would indeed be no justification for its inclusion among the complementizers of English. One could, of course, rightly argue that model-theoretic semantics is about truth and not about linguistic structure and that as such it can legitimately work with arbitrary sets of elements. The problem, however, is that there seems to be a perva~,.-.g ambiguity throughout the book as to the status of the set of entities Hamblin wants to account for. Such ambiguity is illustrated by the word 'imperative' itself, which can refer to a sentence-type, as in linguistics, or alternatively to a category of speech-acts, as seems to be the case in Hamblin's book. The difference between these two interpretations reflects the well-known ambivalence of such terms as 'uttcrance' or 'action', which can be understood to refer either to the result of a process or to the process itself. The use of the plural in the title is apparently not an efficient way of differentiating between the two interpretations, for, in spite of the implicit definition we are given of 'imperatives' as speech acts in chapter one (i.e. 'imperatives'), Hamblin nevertheless proceeds to give them a syntactic definition in chapter three, which is almost entirely restricted to what is traditionally considered as imperative in linguistics (i.e. 'the imperative'). This itself is based on a double misconception.
284
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Book reviews
Admitting that imperatives as described here are a legitimate category of speech acts, it is well-known that there is no one-to-one correspondence between speech acts and linguistic forms and that accordingly there is no justification for identifying a pragmatic category with a syntactic one. Interrogative or declarative sentences can be used to perform commands under certain conditions. Utterances such as Have you told me what you were doing yesterday between 4 and 5 P.M. ? or You haven't told me what you were doing yesterday between 4 and 5 P.M. will undoubtedly be meant and interpreted as orders if they are issued by an officer to a suspect in the interrogation room of a police station. Similarly imperative forms can be used as questions, to elicit answers, as in Tell me what you were doing yesterday between 4 and 5 P.M. Some of them could even be considered as expressing statements, like for instance concessive imperatives of the permissive type ~Ill right, do it, if you must ('You may do it'), and they can also be used performatively as in Be advised that the meeting has been postponed (Hundey 1984). Moreover, if the set described by Hamblin cannot be mapped onto a syntactic category, it hardly qualifies as a speech-act category either. There seems to be no independent pragmatic evidence that the output of linguistic behavior is to be divided into the language of action ('imperatives') and that of description ('indicatives'). The dubious status of 'para-imperatives' and the difficulties met by Hamblin and others in classifying such speech acts as suggestions, advice or warnings in either of these two categories is significant in this respect. The idea underlying such a division into "logical moods" is one that apparently dates back to Harris (1751: 13-17), according to whom "every sentence will be either a sentence of assertion or a sentence of volition" (in James 1986: 12). It has been appealed to by numerous philosophers and linguists in recent times. According to Searle (1972), for instance, some words are uttered to match the world, and some in order for the world to match them. Searle uses this as a criterion to distinguish between 'assertives' on the one hand and 'directives' and 'commissives' on the other ('declaratives' of the non-assertive type are described as establishing the adjustment, or fit, between world and words, whereas 'expressives' are said to involve no adjustment at all). It is on that same distinction that Hamblin draws to create his two sets of 'sentences', those that fit the world and those for which action-reduction, or satisfaction, is required for the world to fit the words. In other words, what was only one criterion in Searle's taxonomy of speech acts becomes the foundation of Hamblin's classification - pragmatics (or rather dialectic) being in charge of handling the differences between the various acts covered by these two °hyper' logical sets. The same concepts have also been used in relation with syntax as a foundation for a distinction between epistemic and root modals and the
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Book reviews
285
indicative and subjunctive moods (see James 1986). Epistemic modals and the subjunctive mood are said by James to belong to 'theoretical modality', i.e. a 'words-to-match-world' manner of representation, whereas root modals and the subjunctive belong to 'practical modality', or a 'world-to-match-words' manner of representation. It is undeniable that there is intuitively some 'semantic' relation between imperative sentences, root modals and the subjunctive on the one hand and declarative sentences, epistemic modals and the indicative on the other. The question, however, here as in numerous other studies in logic and philosophy, is whether or not this distinction has direct correlates in natural language. Interestingly enough, the syntactic studies encounter the same problems of classification as the pragmatic ones. Practical modality is not something that can be equated with a syntactic category such as the subjunctive, for instance. The infinitive or the indicative can also be understood as expressing practical modality after verbs such as WANT in the first case or conjunctions like IF in the second, which clearly indicate that the clauses that follow are meant as 'blueprints' and not as descriptions of reality. As a result the exact status of the entities Hamblin describes is finally left open in the last chapter, along with other "niceties" as a matter for "pedants" (read linguists) to deal with (p. 219). Nor does Hamblin tell us what linguistic features allow a 'sentence' to be interpreted as an 'imperative' or as an 'indicative', thus leaving unanswered the question of the relation between form and use. The only task he assigns himself in that respect is to retrieve from an unnamed, unstructured unit of linguistic output (speech act, utterance or sentence) a propositional content to which he can apply a description in terms of worlds and extensional satisfaction. The fact that linguistic theory is sometimes lacking and that linguistic terms are often ill-defined is certainly no excuse to consider language as unworthy of more consideration than it is usually granted in logical studies (p. 218). A lot can in fact be learnt from linguistic data that could be of interest to both philosophers and logicians. The sentences that linguists consider as imperative in English, for instance, differ from declarative sentences on the one hand in that they have an inverted subject (a feature which they share with interrogative sentences and some conditional clauses) and from indicative ones on the other in that they have a verb form similar to, if not identical with, the subjunctive. That the tense element and the subject are inverted is still visible in the negative in modern English and the imperative and the subjunctive, which were formerly separate moods, now share the same apparent lack of inflection (Boulonnais 1989). These two structural features define a sentencetype with semantic characteristics, which can be used to accomplish a number of speech acts compatible with them. An imperative sentence, for instance, is not normally used directly to describe a state of a~airs because of its nondeictic mood and inverted structure (but see above for indirect uses of
286
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imperatives as statements). Somebody who wishes to express his or her belief in the truth of the proposition that the hearer is optimistic, for instance, will say You are optimistic and not (You) be optimistic, which sounds like some form of advice or recommendation. The imperative, conversely, can serve to express an order or permission (Don't (you) talk to me or All right, don't talk to me, if that makes you feel better) because it is formed with a non-deictic mood and does not imply that the speaker subscribes to the truth of the proposition that is expressed, as is the case with non-inverted forms (You don't talk to me). It is along such lines that one could look for the meaning of the imperative, as what mediates the relation between its form and use. Beyond all this is the question of whether it is acceptable or not in formal semantics to work with sets of elements that cannot be mapped onto linguistic or pragmatic categories. The question is not one of legitimacy. A model like Hamblin's is a device whose purpose is to simulate some aspect of language behaviour. The pragmatic component, for instance, is merely an apparatus destined to reproduce or imitate the interactions between speakers and not to explain them. Generally speaking, a model is free of all the explanatory constraints that apply to theories. The question is rather whether or not it is reasonable to ignore linguistic evidence and it is not a trivial point. It is at the very foundation of any attempt at linguistic description, modellistic or not. Resorting to 'natural' categories, or categories which are independently motivated in natural language, might well prove helpful to avoid some of the confusion of such studies. It might in particular help to do away with the awkwardness associated with a description of the content of imperatives in extensional terms, which in turn necessitates recourse to the notion of 'addressee-action-reduction'. It is in no way obvious, in particular, that the meaning of 'imperatives' relates to the truth of the proposition expressed as with 'indicatives'. If the meaning of the 'indicative' The window is open can be described in terms of a world in which the window is indeed open, it seems rather infelicitous to represent the basic content of Open the window as a world in which the imperative is extensionally satisfied, i.e. a world in which the window is also open (pp. 151sq.). Imperatives do not inherently imply their own satisfaction, as indicatives of the descriptive kind imply the existence of the state of things they describe, hence the embarrassment caused by the inclusion of addressee-action-reduction in their description and the difficulties it entails for the treatment of wishes such as Please, Neal, don't have read it yet (Bolinger 1977: 169) or even concessive imperatives like Smoke, if you wish, whose meaning in ordinary language clearly excludes any form of addressee-action-reduction. As a result, and not surprisingly, the most interesting aspects of the book are those which are not dependent on strictly linguistic considerations, or 'niceties' as Hamblin would have it, like the study of the consistency of different speech acts and his reflections on intention and satisfaction, to name
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just a few. These alone would make the book well worth reading by even the most wary of linguists, for the contribution they make to the understanding of linguistic behaviour as part of a general theory of action.
References Bolinger, Dwight, 1977. Meaning and form. London: Longman. Boulonnais, Dominique, 1989. El6ments pour une d6finition de la notion de phrase. Doctoral thesis, Universit6 de Paris Ill - Sorbonne Nouvelle. Carnap, Rudolph, 1947. Meaning and necessity. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Hare, Richard Mervyn, 1949. Imperative sentences. Mind 58: 21-39. Reprinted in R.M. Hare, 1972: 1-21. Hare, Richard Mervyn, 1972. Practical inferences. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Harris, James, 1751. Hermes. London: J. Nourse and P. Vaillant. Huntley, Martin, 1984. The semantics of English imperatives. Linguistics and Philosophy 7: 103133. James, Francis, 1986. Semantics of the English subjunctive. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Searle, John R., 1972. A taxonomy of illocutionary acts. In: K. Gunderson, ed., Minnesota studies in the philosophy of science 7, 344-369. Minneapolis MN: University of Mirmesota Press. Russell, Bertrand, 1940. An inquiry into meaning and truth. London: Allen and Unwin.
Book reviews
This approach gives the author's dualistic pragmatic model (appealing to R- and Q-principles) wide explanatory value and provides evidence of the influence of pragmatic factors on language structure building. This evidence strongly supports the author's arguments for a reinforced functional/pragmatic component paired with a rather simple semantic component. References Anscombre, Jean-Claude and Oswald Ducrot, 1983. L'argumentation clans la langue. Bruxelles: Mardaga. Anscombre, Jean-Claude and Oswald Ducrot, 1986. Argumentativit6 et informativit6. In: M. Meyer, ed., De la m6taphysique ~i la rh6torique, 79-94. Bruxelles: Editions de rUniversit6 de Bruxelles. Bartsch, R., 1973. 'Negative Transportation' gibt es nicht. Linguistische Berichte 27: 1-7. Barwise, Jon and Robin Cooper, 1981. Generalized quantifiers in natural language. Linguistics and philosophy 4: !59-219. Ducrot, Oswald, 1980. Los 6chelles argumentatives. Paris: l.,¢s Editions de Minuit. Engel, Pascal, 1989. La norme du vrai. Philosophie de la logique. Paris: Gallimard. Fauconnier, Gilles, 1975. Pragmatic scales and logical structure. Linguistic Inquiry 6(3): 353-375. Horn, Laurence, 1984. Toward a new taxonomy for pragmatic inference: Q-based and R-based implicature. In: D. Schiffrin, ed., Meaning, form and use in context: Linguistic applications, 11-42. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Horn, Laurence, 1988. Pragmatic theory. In: F. Newmeyer, ed., linguistics: The Cambridge survey, Vol. 1,113-145. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jackendoff, Ray, 1985. Semantics and cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Jespersen, Otto, 1917. Negation in English and other languages. Copenhagen: A.F. Host of Son. Leech, Geoffrey, 1981. Pragmatics and conversational rhetoric. In: H. Parret et al., eds., Possibilities and limitations of pragmatics, 413-442. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Sommers, Fred., 1982. The logic of natural language. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Sperber, Dan and Deirdre Wilson, 1986. Relevance. Communication and cognition. London: Blackwell.
C.L. Hamblin, Imperatives. Oxford: Basil Biackwell, 1987. 262 pp. US $45.00. Reviewed by Dominique Boulonnais*
HamLlin's book is one in a series of attempts to bring what philosophers call 'imperatives' within the fold of logic. Underlying such endeavours is the claim that imperatives need not, and indeed should not, be rejected from the subject matter of logic because they cannot be accounted for directly within the frameworks normally used for indicatives, such as truth-conditional semanticsa point of view defended earlier by philosophers like Carnap (1947) and now increasingly, but by no means universally, abandoned in practice. * Correspondence address: Dominique Boulonnais, Universit6 de Paris III - Sorbonne Nouvelle, 5 Rue de rEcole-de-M6decine, 75006 Pads, France.
Book reviews
281
Philosophers have traditionally opposed imperatives to indicatives (questions being more often than not treated as a minor category reducible to either of the other two, generally imperatives). In his first chapter, however, Hamblin refuses to provide the reader with a ready-made definition of what he means by imperatives so as to avoid begging the question of their theoretical status; instead he prefers to construct an extensional description of the set of elements he purports to study and to adopt the method of case law. His first category, which he calls 'imperatives proper', includes both 'wilful imperatives', i.e. commands, requests and demands, and 'non wilful imperatives', such as advice, suggestions or instructions. Also discussed are a number of borderline cases, like invitations, and 'stragglers', in particular wishes. In this first category are included both imperative locutions and their grammatical substitutes. The second category is made up of 'permissives', i.e. imperative locutions which are to be understood as containing a conditional of the form /f you wish. Finally, his third category contains what he calls 'paraimperatives', defined as utterances which should not count as imperative in the sense that they do not possess all the characteristics of imperatives and are normally not expressed ~:hrough imperative locutions, but which are nevertheless concerned with action. In this last category we find undertakings, which are first person (as opposed to second or third person imperatives), plans, which are said to be 'forceless', or intentions, which correspond to mental states. Chapter two proceeds, still without a definition, to explore the grammar and logic of imperatives. It deals with a number of well-known grammatical, or as Hamblin sees it pragmatic, features of imperatives in English, such as the restrictions concerning stativity, tense and subject, as well as with the semantic values that obtain for negation in imperative sentences. Hamblin also shows that the traditional operators of logic, such as those which are to be found in conjunctions, disjunctions or conditionals, are also present in imperative sentences, thus confirming the view that the latter constitute a natural domain of study for logic. In chapter three, Hamblin explores three attempts that have been made to derive imperatives from indicatives through a process of reduction (Russell, 1940, being apparently the only philosopher to have suggested the reverse, i.e. that all indicatives should be derived from sentences of the form Know that p). The first of these attempts consists in deriving imperatives from You will p sentences, the second from You should p sentences and the third from performatives such as I order you p (or other similar forms). All these approaches are criticized with the aim of pointing out that imperatives require a different logical treatment from that of indicatives expressing prediction, moral statements and explicit performativity. Also rejected as an attempt to assimilate imperatives to indicatives is Hare's approach based on an illocutionary operator expressing force, which would
282
Book reviews
allow logicians to treat the informative, or propositional, part of sentences, exclusively, as the subject of a logic of imperatives. For Hamblin imperatives require a treatment in their own fight, which would give a comprehensive account of their meaning and use. In order to do this, he has devised a model of what he calls 'action-state semantics'. This is divided into two parts. The first part, which is aimed at describing the basic contert of imperatives, defined as the set of worlds in which the imperative can be considered as satisfied, covers essentially the same ground as informative treatments of imperatives, but within the framework of model-theoretic semantics, whereas the second part deals with the specific aspects of satisfaction, or action-reduction, which characterizes imperatives and distinguishes them from indicatives independently of their individual force. To accommodate imperatives, Hamblin notably stresses the necessity of introducing into traditional possible worlds semantics such notions as a time-scale and distinctions between actions and states and physical and mental possibility, along with features such as intentionality (expressed here through the concept of a strategy). Chapter five investigates the consistency of a set of imperatives. It deals in particular with various sets of conflicting imperatives, like quandaries, i.e. situations in which an agent cannot act without infringing some other imperative, antagonisms, which are inconsistencies on the part of the issuer(s), such as Go out and win! issued by a coach to two adversaries in a game of tennis, and finally obstructed permissions, like clashes between permissions and prohibitions. Chapter six contains a brief incursion into the domain of ability and knowledge, as distinct from that of possibility and choosability explored in chapter four. Ability is analyzed as para-imperative, and an attempt is made to describe the way it interacts with the logic of imperative sentences. In the last chapter, Hamblin tries to introduce a logic of dialogue, or dialectic as he prefers to call it, to handle the pragmatics of imperatives. The force of imperatives, whether they are to be understood as requests, orders or advice for instance, is said to be a function of their use in particular contexts and, as such, to require a separate treatment over and beyond that given to their basic meaning in chapter four. Hamblin only gives us a brief example of what such a logic of dialogue would look like, with a model of the interaction between imperatives and questions, in which he introduces the concept of commitment. Finally the account of the book given above would not be complete without a mention of the formalization, which is always provided whenever it is needed, and of the unusually large number of examples used to illustrate the various points at issue. This, along with its lightness of tone and numerous incursions into such fields as law, ethics and general philosophy, makes the book not only highly readable, but also surprisingly enjoyable.
Book reviews
283
However, if Hamblin's work is indeed meant as an improvement over earlier logical treatments of imperative sentences in the sense that it deals with both satisfaction and force, and not only with propositional content, there are still a number of questions which are difficult to evade, the most fundamental of which have to do with the relation that such studies have with natural language and the vision of natural language they promote. The first of these questions concerns what the author purports to describe in such a study. 'Imperative', in the acceptation retained here, is just another word for what could be called 'the language of action', an expression used sporadically throughout the book. Sentences are divided between the language of action and the language of description. The latter is made up of 'indicative sentences' (sometimes also called 'declaratives'), which have traditionally been considered as the only legitimate subject matter of logic. Contrary to indicatives, which form a rather homogeneous class of 'locutions', the language of action, as Hamblin describes it, is a mixture of linguistic forms. It contains true imperatives, but also declarative sentences of the descriptive and performative kinds whose meaning can be accounted for in terms of action-reduction. We are thus presented with a set of sentences the existence of which is solely justified by the claim that all the elements it contains are amenable to a treatment involving the notion of satisfaction. Admittedly, sets function differently from categories in that they are in no need of independent justification. A linguistic theory which would want to analyse, say, TO as a complementizer would need external evidence, morphological or syntactic, showing that it belongs to the same category as FOR and THAT. Barfing the existence of such empirical confirmation, there would indeed be no justification for its inclusion among the complementizers of English. One could, of course, rightly argue that model-theoretic semantics is about truth and not about linguistic structure and that as such it can legitimately work with arbitrary sets of elements. The problem, however, is that there seems to be a perva~,.-.g ambiguity throughout the book as to the status of the set of entities Hamblin wants to account for. Such ambiguity is illustrated by the word 'imperative' itself, which can refer to a sentence-type, as in linguistics, or alternatively to a category of speech-acts, as seems to be the case in Hamblin's book. The difference between these two interpretations reflects the well-known ambivalence of such terms as 'uttcrance' or 'action', which can be understood to refer either to the result of a process or to the process itself. The use of the plural in the title is apparently not an efficient way of differentiating between the two interpretations, for, in spite of the implicit definition we are given of 'imperatives' as speech acts in chapter one (i.e. 'imperatives'), Hamblin nevertheless proceeds to give them a syntactic definition in chapter three, which is almost entirely restricted to what is traditionally considered as imperative in linguistics (i.e. 'the imperative'). This itself is based on a double misconception.
284
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Book reviews
Admitting that imperatives as described here are a legitimate category of speech acts, it is well-known that there is no one-to-one correspondence between speech acts and linguistic forms and that accordingly there is no justification for identifying a pragmatic category with a syntactic one. Interrogative or declarative sentences can be used to perform commands under certain conditions. Utterances such as Have you told me what you were doing yesterday between 4 and 5 P.M. ? or You haven't told me what you were doing yesterday between 4 and 5 P.M. will undoubtedly be meant and interpreted as orders if they are issued by an officer to a suspect in the interrogation room of a police station. Similarly imperative forms can be used as questions, to elicit answers, as in Tell me what you were doing yesterday between 4 and 5 P.M. Some of them could even be considered as expressing statements, like for instance concessive imperatives of the permissive type ~Ill right, do it, if you must ('You may do it'), and they can also be used performatively as in Be advised that the meeting has been postponed (Hundey 1984). Moreover, if the set described by Hamblin cannot be mapped onto a syntactic category, it hardly qualifies as a speech-act category either. There seems to be no independent pragmatic evidence that the output of linguistic behavior is to be divided into the language of action ('imperatives') and that of description ('indicatives'). The dubious status of 'para-imperatives' and the difficulties met by Hamblin and others in classifying such speech acts as suggestions, advice or warnings in either of these two categories is significant in this respect. The idea underlying such a division into "logical moods" is one that apparently dates back to Harris (1751: 13-17), according to whom "every sentence will be either a sentence of assertion or a sentence of volition" (in James 1986: 12). It has been appealed to by numerous philosophers and linguists in recent times. According to Searle (1972), for instance, some words are uttered to match the world, and some in order for the world to match them. Searle uses this as a criterion to distinguish between 'assertives' on the one hand and 'directives' and 'commissives' on the other ('declaratives' of the non-assertive type are described as establishing the adjustment, or fit, between world and words, whereas 'expressives' are said to involve no adjustment at all). It is on that same distinction that Hamblin draws to create his two sets of 'sentences', those that fit the world and those for which action-reduction, or satisfaction, is required for the world to fit the words. In other words, what was only one criterion in Searle's taxonomy of speech acts becomes the foundation of Hamblin's classification - pragmatics (or rather dialectic) being in charge of handling the differences between the various acts covered by these two °hyper' logical sets. The same concepts have also been used in relation with syntax as a foundation for a distinction between epistemic and root modals and the
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indicative and subjunctive moods (see James 1986). Epistemic modals and the subjunctive mood are said by James to belong to 'theoretical modality', i.e. a 'words-to-match-world' manner of representation, whereas root modals and the subjunctive belong to 'practical modality', or a 'world-to-match-words' manner of representation. It is undeniable that there is intuitively some 'semantic' relation between imperative sentences, root modals and the subjunctive on the one hand and declarative sentences, epistemic modals and the indicative on the other. The question, however, here as in numerous other studies in logic and philosophy, is whether or not this distinction has direct correlates in natural language. Interestingly enough, the syntactic studies encounter the same problems of classification as the pragmatic ones. Practical modality is not something that can be equated with a syntactic category such as the subjunctive, for instance. The infinitive or the indicative can also be understood as expressing practical modality after verbs such as WANT in the first case or conjunctions like IF in the second, which clearly indicate that the clauses that follow are meant as 'blueprints' and not as descriptions of reality. As a result the exact status of the entities Hamblin describes is finally left open in the last chapter, along with other "niceties" as a matter for "pedants" (read linguists) to deal with (p. 219). Nor does Hamblin tell us what linguistic features allow a 'sentence' to be interpreted as an 'imperative' or as an 'indicative', thus leaving unanswered the question of the relation between form and use. The only task he assigns himself in that respect is to retrieve from an unnamed, unstructured unit of linguistic output (speech act, utterance or sentence) a propositional content to which he can apply a description in terms of worlds and extensional satisfaction. The fact that linguistic theory is sometimes lacking and that linguistic terms are often ill-defined is certainly no excuse to consider language as unworthy of more consideration than it is usually granted in logical studies (p. 218). A lot can in fact be learnt from linguistic data that could be of interest to both philosophers and logicians. The sentences that linguists consider as imperative in English, for instance, differ from declarative sentences on the one hand in that they have an inverted subject (a feature which they share with interrogative sentences and some conditional clauses) and from indicative ones on the other in that they have a verb form similar to, if not identical with, the subjunctive. That the tense element and the subject are inverted is still visible in the negative in modern English and the imperative and the subjunctive, which were formerly separate moods, now share the same apparent lack of inflection (Boulonnais 1989). These two structural features define a sentencetype with semantic characteristics, which can be used to accomplish a number of speech acts compatible with them. An imperative sentence, for instance, is not normally used directly to describe a state of a~airs because of its nondeictic mood and inverted structure (but see above for indirect uses of
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imperatives as statements). Somebody who wishes to express his or her belief in the truth of the proposition that the hearer is optimistic, for instance, will say You are optimistic and not (You) be optimistic, which sounds like some form of advice or recommendation. The imperative, conversely, can serve to express an order or permission (Don't (you) talk to me or All right, don't talk to me, if that makes you feel better) because it is formed with a non-deictic mood and does not imply that the speaker subscribes to the truth of the proposition that is expressed, as is the case with non-inverted forms (You don't talk to me). It is along such lines that one could look for the meaning of the imperative, as what mediates the relation between its form and use. Beyond all this is the question of whether it is acceptable or not in formal semantics to work with sets of elements that cannot be mapped onto linguistic or pragmatic categories. The question is not one of legitimacy. A model like Hamblin's is a device whose purpose is to simulate some aspect of language behaviour. The pragmatic component, for instance, is merely an apparatus destined to reproduce or imitate the interactions between speakers and not to explain them. Generally speaking, a model is free of all the explanatory constraints that apply to theories. The question is rather whether or not it is reasonable to ignore linguistic evidence and it is not a trivial point. It is at the very foundation of any attempt at linguistic description, modellistic or not. Resorting to 'natural' categories, or categories which are independently motivated in natural language, might well prove helpful to avoid some of the confusion of such studies. It might in particular help to do away with the awkwardness associated with a description of the content of imperatives in extensional terms, which in turn necessitates recourse to the notion of 'addressee-action-reduction'. It is in no way obvious, in particular, that the meaning of 'imperatives' relates to the truth of the proposition expressed as with 'indicatives'. If the meaning of the 'indicative' The window is open can be described in terms of a world in which the window is indeed open, it seems rather infelicitous to represent the basic content of Open the window as a world in which the imperative is extensionally satisfied, i.e. a world in which the window is also open (pp. 151sq.). Imperatives do not inherently imply their own satisfaction, as indicatives of the descriptive kind imply the existence of the state of things they describe, hence the embarrassment caused by the inclusion of addressee-action-reduction in their description and the difficulties it entails for the treatment of wishes such as Please, Neal, don't have read it yet (Bolinger 1977: 169) or even concessive imperatives like Smoke, if you wish, whose meaning in ordinary language clearly excludes any form of addressee-action-reduction. As a result, and not surprisingly, the most interesting aspects of the book are those which are not dependent on strictly linguistic considerations, or 'niceties' as Hamblin would have it, like the study of the consistency of different speech acts and his reflections on intention and satisfaction, to name
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just a few. These alone would make the book well worth reading by even the most wary of linguists, for the contribution they make to the understanding of linguistic behaviour as part of a general theory of action.
References Bolinger, Dwight, 1977. Meaning and form. London: Longman. Boulonnais, Dominique, 1989. El6ments pour une d6finition de la notion de phrase. Doctoral thesis, Universit6 de Paris Ill - Sorbonne Nouvelle. Carnap, Rudolph, 1947. Meaning and necessity. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Hare, Richard Mervyn, 1949. Imperative sentences. Mind 58: 21-39. Reprinted in R.M. Hare, 1972: 1-21. Hare, Richard Mervyn, 1972. Practical inferences. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Harris, James, 1751. Hermes. London: J. Nourse and P. Vaillant. Huntley, Martin, 1984. The semantics of English imperatives. Linguistics and Philosophy 7: 103133. James, Francis, 1986. Semantics of the English subjunctive. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Searle, John R., 1972. A taxonomy of illocutionary acts. In: K. Gunderson, ed., Minnesota studies in the philosophy of science 7, 344-369. Minneapolis MN: University of Mirmesota Press. Russell, Bertrand, 1940. An inquiry into meaning and truth. London: Allen and Unwin.