Non-past Directives in Japanese

Abstract

This paper concerns non-past directives (NPDs) in Japanese, non-past declarative sentences that serve as directive speech acts like imperatives. I observe that NPDs can be felicitous in a more restricted range of contexts than imperatives. To capture this restriction, building on Kaufmann’s (2012) modal approach to imperatives, I propose that NPDs contain a modal that is the same as the one in imperatives except that it triggers a presupposition that the speaker considers the behavior of the addressee(s) to be irrational. This proposal will be supported by the “Hey, wait a minute.” test. The results of this paper tentatively support the modal approach to the semantics of imperatives.