ABSTRACT
Speech-act theories of meaning have enjoyed a rise in prominence with Hanks and Soames. Both focus the vast majority of their attention on providing an analysis of the semantic contents of assertions and more or less assume the extension of their accounts to questions and commands. This chapter examines two foundational issues that arise when attempting to extend the speech-act analysis to imperatives. The first issue is that because imperatives successfully embed under logical operators like disjunction, a version of the Frege-Geach problem arises. The second issue is that embedding under negation forces any such theory to make transparent how contradictory commands are to be represented. We argue that both issues can be adequately addressed by an extension of the account in Hanks, and therefore Hanks' view should be considered a viable overall theory for the semantics of imperatives.
