Adressee in syntax

In view of two empirical phenomena: (i) allocutivity, and (ii) imperatives with a2nd person (2P) subject, recent literature argues that the utterance addressee is represented syntax-internally. However, the addressee representation sunderlying each of the phenomena differ. Allocutivity, defined as verba lagreement with the addressee, underlies an argumental representation of the addressee located in the speech act phrase labeled as the Adr (Miyagawa 2012). In contrast, imperatives host a Jussive Phrase, which encodes the addressee via a 2P feature and is restricted to imperative clauses only (Zanuttini2008). This project aims to understand why these two phenomena, both of which involve syntactic reference to the addressee, should be analyzed differently. With the goal of providing an account of the addressee in syntax, this project asks the following question: how specific is the notion of addressee inimperatives, and can it be unified with the freely available Adr, also responsible for allocutivity?

Team:
Gurmeet Kaur (Postdoc), Hedde Zeijlstra (PI)