Negation-Licensed Commands: The Imperative Operator Outside Canonical Imperative Clauses

Most formal research on the imperative sentence type has focused on canonical imperatives, forms like Leave! , which are often characterized across languages by properties such as bare verbal morphology and omission of the subject. Noncanonical imperatives therefore offer an opportunity to investigate imperative properties from a different perspective. This article argues that negation-licensed commands, forms like No smoking! , first introduced in Iatridou 2021, contain an unusual combination of properties that offer a unique insight into the nature of canonical imperatives. This article has two main findings: (i) negation-licensed commands have a morphosyntax similar to that of existential declaratives, but a speech-act update similar to that of canonical imperatives, and (ii) their speech-act update is subtly different from canonical imperatives in a way that motivates a reevaluation of the speech-act operator in canonical imperatives. This article therefore demonstrates that noncanonical constructions are worth studying not only because of their interesting properties, but also because they offer insights into canonical constructions that could not be gathered otherwise.