ABSTRACT
The most theoretically central topic in the generative syntax literature on English imperatives has been the status of imperative do, don’t, and do not in relation to their tensed clause counterparts. This chapter presents novel syntactic and semantic evidence in favor of the claim that do(n’t) is an inflectional head base-generated in I°, as in finite clauses. It also presents syntactic and semantic parallels between imperatives and indicative clauses that are captured with an auxiliary analysis. The chapter provides two parallels between imperatives and finite clauses, one syntactic the second semantic, that follow automatically from the auxiliary analysis and are easily analyzable within the proposal. The extension creates an interesting completeness in the imperative inflectional paradigm. The auxiliary analysis differs from the particle analysis in that it formally recognizes and seeks to maximize the similarity between imperatives and finite clauses—one of its explicit motivations.
