A Unified Analysis of Conditional Imperatives

The main goal of this paper is to develop a unified semantic analysis of CIs, one which adequately captures their similarities to (unconditional) imperatives on the one hand and (unimperative) conditionals, on the other. Both of those latter phenomena have been explored extensively and, differences over theoretical framework and formal implementation notwithstanding, are comparatively well-understood. In tackling CIs, then, the first question to ask is whether or to what extent their semantic behavior can be captured by simply combining an analysis of imperatives with one of conditionals. We show in this paper that the answer is affirmative in principle, but that CIs also raise a number of specific challenges which in turn inform the analysis of imperatives and conditionals in general.