LINGUIST List 3.232

Mon 09 Mar 1992

Disc: V and V

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

1. Richard Sproat, 3.214 Responses: Imperatives
2. Hartmut Haberland, Re: 3.228 V and V
3. Dominique Estival, Laugh and the world laughs with you
4. , Laugh and the world does too
5. mark, Laugh and the world laughs with you

Bruce Nevin's response that constructions of the form "Laugh and the
world laughs at you" involve "you"-deletion may be right, but note
that the verb cannot be the indicative form, as the following series
shows:

1) If you are fair to others then others will be fair to you.
2) ?If you be fair to others then others will be fair to you. (archaic)
3) *Are fair to others and others will be fair to you.
4) Be fair to others an others will be fair to you.

Perhaps the (archaic) use of the subjunctive is preserved in such
forms. Or maybe such forms really are imperatives used as conditionals
as Martin Haspelmath's German evidence suggests is possible.

Richard Sproat
Linguistics Research Department
AT&T Bell Laboratories			tel (908) 582-5296
600 Mountain Avenue, Room 2d-451	fax (908) 582-7308
Murray Hill, NJ 07974			rwsresearch.att.com

Message 2: Re: 3.228 V and V

Sorry, I didn't get the beginning of the discussion. Is the paper by Haiman
referred to his 1983 paper 'Paratactic if-clauses' (which vovers structures of
the type S[1] (and) S[2]) in Journal of Pragmatics 7(3):263-281?

French also provides supporting evidence for the argument that the first
clause in such sentences is an imperative. The ordering of clitic
pronouns in (positive) imperative clauses is different from the ordering
found in any other type of clauses, and it is this ordering you find
here, not the ordering of a declarative clause you would get by ellipsis
of the subject:

 "Donne-le-moi" (give it to me)
 "Tu me le donnes" (you give it to me)

 "Donne-le-moi une fois de plus et nous aurons fini"
 (give it to me one more time and we will be done)

 "Donnez-lui un coup de pied et il vous en rendra cent"
 (kick him one and he will kick you back a hundred times)

By the way, I too fail to see what the problem is in allowing the conjunction
of an imperative and a declarative clause.

Dominique Estival

re "weep and you weep alone"
Assume elision of a pronoun for the initial verb to be plausible, since
that covert pronoun must be co-indexed with the later overt pronoun (as no
other filler could grammatically be). The elision surely concerns not any
personal pronoun but (what I term) "weak pronouns"; those without specific
antecedent, roughly ="people", as in "you have to go on breathing" (scarcely in
normal relationships "YOU have to.."
The presence of "and" in such conditional sentences ("gnomic" would be a good
term for what is being discussed) is not different from any other co-ordination
of clauses, where the second is properly a consequence of the first, "he came
and spoke to me" being different in discourse from "he spoke and came to me".

I was hoping someone else with a better memory would post on this
subject, but I haven't seen it yet. Someone, perhaps at
Berkeley, wrote on just this subject, probably in the seventies
since that's when I was there. Furthermore, the parallel
construction with "or" is just as common:

Finish your spinach or (else)/ you can't watch "The Simpsons".
 \ no "Simpsons". [commoner?]
Buy this comic or we WON'T shoot the cat! [from the cover of a
 comic book... it's a long story]
Surrender or die!

(And how do we parse "Root hog or die"? Is "hog" vocative, with
the surrounding commas/pauses deleted?)

The "or" is exclusive. A child who finished her spinach and was
denied "The Simpsons" anyway, with no further justification,
would have good cause to complain.

 Mark A. Mandel
 Dragon Systems, Inc. : speech recognition : +1 617 965-5200
 320 Nevada St. : Newton, Mass. 02160, USA