Minimalist Reflections on English and Arabic Imperatives: Toward a Cross-Linguistic Syntax of Directives

This study presents a comparative analysis of the syntactic architecture of English and Arabic imperative constructions, with a specific focus on the divergent behavioral properties of unergative and unaccusative verbs within the framework of the Minimalist Program. It critically re-examines the generative processes underlying imperative formation and proposes a refined analysis for the optimal syntactic placement of the imperative verb in English, probing the fundamental computational mechanisms that shape this command structure. Utilizing a descriptive, analytical, and qualitative methodology grounded in core minimalist principles, this research posits the imperative feature as a fundamental syntactic determinant that governs the construction and interpretation of these utterances. The findings demonstrate that unergative verbs, characterized by their external agentive arguments, exhibit a natural alignment with the syntactic requirements of the imperative mood. Conversely, unaccusative verbs, which base-generate a single internal theme argument, display significant licensing restrictions, a phenomenon particularly pronounced in English. Arabic manifests a remarkable degree of flexibility in forming unaccusative imperatives, a capacity attributed to its rich system of morphological agreement, which effectively licenses the null imperative subject. Ultimately, while both Arabic and English imperatives are derived through universal syntactic operations namely the core mechanisms of Merge, Move, and feature valuation their surface realizations diverge significantly. This contrast underscores the pivotal role of language-specific morphosyntactic features in modulating universal grammatical processes, thereby yielding the distinct formal properties of imperative constructions across these two languages.