Josep Ausensi, Sebastian Buchczyk
Current Research in the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface
In this paper, we concern ourselves with what we dub as RHETORICAL IMPERATIVES (RIs) in Catalan and German, following Ihara and Asano (2020), illustrated below in the example in (1) from Catalan. RIs constitute a subset of imperatives which, as far as we are concerned, have gone understudied in previous work, with the exception of Asano and Ihara (2019) and Ihara and Asano (2020), who draw on Japanese data to propose the existence of a similar class of imperatives. Here, we observe that RIs are a phenomenon beyond Japanese and extends to Romance and Germanic languages.
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