Who benefits from an imperative? Assessment of directives on a benefit scale

Tatiana Perevozchikova and Anna Chromá
University of Tübingen | Charles University

The distribution of benefits associated with a projected future action has been considered important in determining the type of directive expressed by an imperative. However, there has been little research on how speakers perceive the beneficiary of future action in imperatives and how these perceptions are influenced by the linguistic forms in the imperative utterance. This article reports on an experiment on Czech that tests whether the distinction between imperatives benefiting the speaker and imperatives benefiting the addressee is valid and whether it is influenced by the grammatical person of a modal verb expressing a rationale for the imperative. The results show that imperatives preceded by a first-person modal are judged as benefiting the speaker and imperatives preceded by a second-person modal as benefiting the addressee. The study thus demonstrates how the exact same imperative can be linguistically manipulated to be interpreted as benefiting either the speaker or the addressee.

Publication history

Date received: 7 October 2024

Date accepted: 23 January 2026

Table of contents

Imperatives are known to express a wide range of speech acts, from commands, orders and requests, as in (1a)–(1c), to suggestions, invitations and good wishes, as in (1d)–(1f).

Funding

This work was supported by the European Regional Development Fund project “Beyond Security: Role of Conflict in Resilience-Building” (reg. no.: CZ.02.01.01/00/22_008/0004595).

This article was made Open Access under a CC BY 4.0 license through payment of an APC by or on behalf of the authors.

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Address for correspondence

Tatiana Perevozchikova

Slavic Department

Universität Tübingen

Wilhelmstraße 50

D-72074 Tübingen

Germany

[email protected]

Biographical notes

Tatiana Perevozchikova is an Associate Professor of Slavic Linguistics at the University of Tübingen. Her research has centered on variation in morphosyntax, language contact, second language acquisition and heritage languages from a usage-based perspective.

ORCiD logo with linkhttps://orcid.org/0000-0002-5294-4834

Anna Chromá is a PhD student and a research assistant at Charles University and at the Psychological Institute of Czech Academy of Sciences. Her focus is on first language acquisition, especially on early morphosyntax and personal pronouns. She founded the first Czech corpus of child language and further collaborates on its development.

 
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