3.1 Prescriptive infinitives

Somebody listening to a parent talking to their toddler in any of the North Germanic languages will soon realise that their language contains prescriptives that are not imperatives, but infinitives. This pan-North Germanic class of prescriptives has not been previously studied, though the use of the infinitive with prescriptive function is briefly mentioned in Hansen & Heltoft (Reference Hansen and Heltoft2011) for Danish, and in Collberg & Håkansson (Reference Collberg and Håkansson1999) and Teleman et al. (Reference Teleman, Hellberg and Andersson1999) for Swedish.

3.2 Pragmatic differences?

A question now is whether the prescriptive infinitives in child-directed speech have different pragmatic functions from the standard imperatives. Could it not just be that child-directed speech should be interpreted as a separate dialect, so that these infinitives have the same pragmatic function in that dialect as the standard adult-to-adult imperatives have in the adult-directed dialect? If the language that parents generally use towards children differs in significant ways from the standard one, a case could be made for an affirmative answer to the question. If, however, other inflectional patterns are the same as in the standard language, it would be more difficult to maintain that child-directed speech is a separate variety. If, further, we find examples of both imperatives and prescriptive infinitives in the child-directed variety, we expect some pragmatic, functional, difference.

Looking closer at the Norwegian, Swedish and Danish corpus data it is clear that the child-directed language is not very different from the standard language: In Section 3.1 we saw that inflections (both verbal and nominal) are present in the parent-to-child language. Here we will see that we also find examples of the standard imperatives in the same dialogues as those where we find the prescriptive infinitives (26)–(29), all from the same dialogues where we earlier found the infinitive type.

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The data suggest that imperatives and prescriptive infinitives exist side by side, so we should look for a possible pragmatic difference between them. Having studied the child corpus dialogues, it appears that when the adult is upset and possibly annoyed with the child, it is the standard imperatives that appear. The infinitives, on the other hand, are used when the situation is calm and pleasant, in a caring and loving manner. This is further supported by the finding that it is rarely the investigator (unrelated to the child) that uses the prescriptive infinitives; it is usually the parent who does this. They seem to be reserved for a particular use that would sometimes be too intimate for somebody from the outside. This particular pragmatic context cannot be confirmed by references to the literature, given its lack of previous description, but the present author has presented this work at several conferences (see the acknowledgements section) and also talked to many Scandinavian linguists about it. The common reaction to this claim is energetic nodding and a smile of confirmation.Footnote ⁶

This is not to say that they can only be used in child-directed speech. Any speaker who has a superior position with respect to the listener, and who feels warmly towards them in the conversation, could use these infinitives. The following utterance was overheard used in a friendly manner by an expert on boating and sea to a younger man who had performed a very dangerous swim the year before. The older man wagged his index finger at the younger man, and said (30) with a glimpse in his eye:

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A recent Facebook posting shows something similar. A female lecturer in English linguistics wrote (31) on her wall to Mr. Ari Behn, who is not an academic, but whose claim to fame is his former marriage to the Norwegian Princess Märtha Louise, suggesting that he learn better English. This happened after he had published an article in an English newspaper with a number of spelling errors. She disclosed later that she liked him, which confirms the prerequisite positive attitude suggested in this paper.Footnote ^{7 ,} Footnote ⁸

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It can also be used towards animals. The following text was found as an illustration in a student newspaper, where a representative in the Students's Parliament comments on the arrival of a new student list, the Trojan List, depicted as a horse in the illustration, (32). A cartoon (with the popular young man Pondus as a protagonist) recently depicted Pondus and his dog, saying (33) to the dog.

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Heltoft & Hansen (Reference Hansen and Heltoft2011:738) observe something similar for Danish. They say that the infinitive used in an imperative function marks that the speaker is in a position of strength relative to the receiver, so that it is not always easy to use this infinitival imperative towards adult speakers.Footnote ¹¹ Their example seems to be uttered by a football trainer towards a grown-up player on his team, (34).

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Without more context it is difficult to tell whether the Danish utterance is said in an agitated mood or in a friendly (and perhaps humorous) atmosphere.

Faroese prescriptive infinitives can also be used towards adults. In those cases, they must be negated (a requirement we also saw has been raised for the Swedish prescriptive infinitives, note 5, and which has also been reported for some Norwegian dialects and Icelandic, as will be shown in Section 4). The hierarchical social dimension is necessary for the construction to occur. According to Hjalmar P. Petersen (p.c.), (35) is often uttered by his older sister, ten years his senior, to him, but could never be uttered by him towards her:

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The Icelandic prescriptive can also be used towards adults. There is a pragmatic difference between it and the imperative, in that the latter is more formal (Eiríkur Rögnvaldsson, p.c., and recall also Norwegian in note 8). Thus, (36a) is almost exclusively found in spoken language, in contrast with (36b).

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The fact that the prescriptive infinitive is a grammatical form whose use depends on the pragmatic context, is reminiscent of the honorifics in other languages, from Japanese (Okada Reference Okada1963) and Korean (Lee Reference Lee1991) to many Indo-European languages. Prescriptive infinitives can only be used towards very small children (and animals) or towards people who are very clearly at the lowest point of the relevant hierarchy, and who can accept this fact in a pleasant atmosphere. Without such a mutual understanding of their roles among the participants in the speech event, the prescriptive infinitive would be unbearably condescending.Footnote ¹²

3.3 Syntactic differences

3.3.5 Summary of the syntactic facts

A summary of the syntactic facts in imperatives and child-directed prescriptive infinitives is given in Table 1. For all five standard languages, we see that the finite imperatives are V–Neg; negation is postposed (apart from Norwegian, where negation is preferred pre-verbally). Subjects of finite imperatives, if expressed, are second person, and they are post-verbal.

Table 1. The syntactic differences between imperatives and prescriptive infinitives.

Abbreviations expanded: Verb–Negation, Negation–Verb, Subject–Verb, Verb–Subject, second person subject, third person subject, personal pronoun subject

^a Although an overt subject may not be acceptable in these languages, reflexive pronouns reveal the person of the subject.

^b Parentheses have been used in this column to indicate that these data have not been found in any source independent of the informants, who were uncertain about them.

The child-directed prescriptive infinitives have pre-verbal negation and pre-verbal subject. The preferred subject is third, not second person. Subjects are normally unexpressed or lexical, not pronouns (but third person reflexive pronouns are OK).

3.4 On the history of the child-directed infinitival imperatives

Determining the age of a construction is not easy, especially if we have to go back to a time, more than a thousand years ago, when daily life was not as frequently documented in writing. The child-directed prescriptive infinitives exist across all the North Germanic languages, with largely the same pragmatic and syntactic properties. It is improbable that five languages over such a vast area should have developed, independently in each language, a construction with the same formal and pragmatic characteristics. The most likely history is therefore one of a common origin.

An alternative might have been one of borrowing; that the construction developed first as an innovation in one place and then spread to the rest of the languages in the area. But this is unlikely. If the change had happened after the languages split, they (especially Icelandic and Faroese as against Norwegian, Swedish and Danish) would not have been mutually intelligible, so the borrowing of a particular syntactic phenomenon would be surprising. On the other hand, specific language features, such as the uvular trill /ʀ/, the development of the perfect verb form and even articles, have been known to spread across very different languages, so borrowings are not totally out of the question. However, for prescriptive infinitives, it is hard to fathom how this construction could have spread, because of its pragmatics. It is mainly used by parents towards little children, and in a nice and pleasant atmosphere, as we have seen. This is not a situation that is typically visible to outsiders, and especially not to people speaking a different language. It is therefore unlikely that it could have spread across such a vast area by way of borrowing.

One last possibility might have been that the child-directed prescriptive infinitives were a relic of an earlier stage of imperatives, but diachronic facts rule this out. In Section 4 we will see that there are some dialects in Trøndelag, Norway, which have both an inflected imperative and a prescriptive infinitive. According to Haugen (Reference Haugen1982:99, 142, 149) and Munch (Reference Munch2013), the latter must be newer than the former. Haugen says that while the imperative form in Old Norse was identical to the stem (i.e. our inflected imperative), these forms have now died out in the Oppdal dialect (Haugen Reference Haugen1982:99). Thus, while there are dialects in which prescriptive infinitives are the only jussic alternative, they are actually newer than the imperatives.

The word order Neg–V also seems new for imperatives generally. Munch (Reference Munch2013:260–262) concludes that it is a ‘(rather new) innovation’ in Norwegian, in contrast to V–Neg. The literature suggests that Old Norse had V–Neg order, see Haugen (Reference Haugen1982) and Faarlund (Reference Faarlund2004:228). The Neg–V order is first mentioned in a grammar of the Bergen dialect (Larsen & Stoltz Reference Larsen and Stoltz1912), according to Munch's findings. Her conclusion is supported by the fact that Aasen's (Reference Aasen1864) thorough grammar of Norwegian only mentions the V–Neg order with imperatives, as in (62):

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It cannot be the case, then, that the prescriptive infinitives have developed from some earlier stage of imperatives. The most likely history of the child-directed prescriptive infinitives is that they have existed in all the languages since before the languages separated, i.e. before ad 500, and probably even long before that. One could ask why there is no documentation of this variety in the written sources from earlier times; the answer probably lies in the genre. The kind of pragmatic context needed for the child-directed imperatives is highly marked, and probably would not be considered suitable in written texts.

6.1 Adressee: Third person and not second person

We have seen (Sections 3.3.2 and 3.3.3) that child-directed prescriptive infinitives do not have pronominally expressed subjects for the addressee, and that subjects tend to be a third person non-pronominal DP. Exactly how this is encoded in the grammar should be investigated. A first step is to study how the relationship between a syntactic function and a discourse context role has been treated in the literature. The most relevant literature will be presented in this section.

Prescriptives (infinitival as well as imperatives generally) have in common that the subject is the addressee. Formalising the relationship between a syntactic category and a contextual role has been proposed in the literature. Sigurðsson (Reference Sigurðsson, Bianchi and Safir2004, Reference Sigurðsson2014:182) links syntax to pragmatic context, and argues that the person category is a syntactic category. Sigurðsson's theory assigns the person category by computation, so that when an argument is personal (normally not inanimate and not indefinite), and it has a negative value for logophoric agent and a positive value for logophoric patient, it is ‘second person by computation’. First person, on the other hand, has a positive value for logophoric agent, and a negative value for logophoric patient. Third person has a negative logophoric value for both agent and patient, or if the argument is non-personal. Sigurðsson formalises it this way:

1. (85) NP_+Pn → NP_{+Pn/+LA, –LP} = 1st person by computation

   NP_+Pn → NP_{+Pn/–LA, +LP} = 2nd person by computation

   NP_+Pn → NP_{+Pn/–LA, –LP} = 3rd person by computation

   NP_−Pn = 3rd person by default

   (Sigurðsson Reference Sigurðsson2014:180)

Since Sigurðsson's theory does not take imperatives (or prescriptives generally) into account, it does not predict the right person for the logophoric roles. Subjects are [+Pn/+LA, –LP], i.e. first person by Sigurðsson's theory, while in imperatives they ought to have been computed as second person, and in prescriptive infinitives as third person.

Alcázar & Saltarelli (Reference Alcázar and Saltarelli2014:Chapter 4), building on work by Ross (Reference Ross, Jacobs and Rosenbaum1970), Bianchi (Reference Bianchi, Guéron and Tasmowski2003), Sigurðsson (Reference Sigurðsson, Bianchi and Safir2004) and Zanuttini (Reference Zanuttini2008:197), propose a syntactic minimalist analysis of imperatives. They, too, formalize the relationship between the syntax and the context. Splitting up the verb into the roles of A = speaker, B = addressee and C = performer, they account for canonical and extended imperatives, respectively, as in (86a, b). In canonical imperatives, such as Go!, the speaker is first person, while the addressee is the same as the performer, second person. The extended type, on the other hand, for sentences like Let us/him/*you go!, distinguishes between addressee (who must be second person) and performer (who must be first or third person). It is the light verb that assigns the speakers associated with the roles, according to their ‘light’ performative hypothesis (LPH; Alcázar & Saltarelli Reference Alcázar and Saltarelli2014: 111).

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This model has the advantage that it encodes the speech act into the syntax, so the speaker is first person and the addressee second person. Bennis (Reference Bennis and Wurff2007:§5, 133), too, proposes that second person is part of the actual syntactic structure, specifically as a feature in the imperative C-position. Alcázar & Saltarelli (Reference Alcázar and Saltarelli2014:111 ex. (5)) take the ‘prescribe’ label of the v node in the diagrams to include meanings such as demand, request and prohibition. However, the computational mechanism that derives person and number restrictions is actually not argued for: ‘Thus, under LPH, the Speaker>Addressee relation is ultimately derived as a syntactic dependency theorem, conceivably along with Person (/Number) restrictions’ (Alcázar & Saltarelli Reference Alcázar and Saltarelli2014:117, my emphasis). For prescriptive infinitives, their theorem does not capture the correct generalization, since addressee (B) would need to be third person.

A more fine-grained distinction is needed. We should distinguish between syntactic function (such as subject), syntactic category (pronoun or DP), context roles (speaker, addressee, etc.) and syntactic person (such as second or third person). Collins & Postal (Reference Collins and Postal.2012), citing work as early as Jespersen (Reference Jespersen1924), discuss various types of third person DPs, which they call imposters, that are used instead of pronouns, such as in (87a), where the DP replaces a first person pronoun, and (87b) a second person pronoun:

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   1. a. This reviewer was unable to follow the logic of the submission.

   2. b. Would the baroness like more wine?

   (Collins & Postal Reference Collins and Postal.2012:2)

They provide an analysis which builds on that of appositive structures (such as We, the present writers, disagree with the following points), where both the imposter and the antecedent pronoun are present in the structure.

While Collins & Postal (2012) propose a way that imposter DPs can be analysed with the correct interpretation, they do not account for the cases where the imposter DPs, as we can call the explicit non-pronominal subjects of our prescriptive infinitives, are obligatorily expressed as imposters, if they are to be expressed at all, as in the subjects in the Norwegian child-directed infinitives.

The integration of syntax and discourse that has been illustrated in this section will be a basis for an analysis of imperatives and prescriptive infinitives in Sections 6.2–6.3.

6.2 Lack of case: Subject is DP not pronoun

We have seen that the prescriptive infinitives do not have second person arguments. Instead of following Sigurðsson (Reference Sigurðsson, Bianchi and Safir2004, Reference Sigurðsson2014) and Alcázar & Saltarelli (Reference Alcázar and Saltarelli2014), who assign person directly as a function of the roles of speaker and addressee, it would be more desirable if this could follow from purely general syntactic facts. The main characteristic of the prescriptive infinitives is that they are infinitival, i.e. they lack finiteness.

Could the finiteness feature be related to the missing first and second person subject? Finiteness has been known to have the property of assigning case (since Chomsky Reference Chomsky1980). With null case assignment, an argument is realised as PRO (Chomsky Reference Chomsky1995:119–120), typically with infinitives. Other infinitives discussed in the literature are not independent sentences as they are in our case, but are the argument of a verb or an infinitival marker that lays out the conditions for a controlled or a free PRO, or they become part of an ECM construction. Prescriptive infinitives have no higher verb that could licence ECM for their external argument. Neither can they have free PRO: Like imperatives, they have a defined set of agents – speaker, addressee and performer – which follows from their imperative force feature. Prescriptive infinitives have no finiteness projection, so there is no licencer of case. Without case assignment pronouns cannot be licenced, since they are the only category in Norwegian that has overt case-marking. This is particularly true for first and second person pronouns, whose case distinctions are kept distinct in most dialects, in contrast to the third person, in which the morphological case contrasts have disappeared both in the singular and the plural. Lexical words, on the other hand, are not case-marked in the vast majority of Norwegian dialects, and proper names are never case-marked. It could be, therefore, that lack of overt case-assignment by a finiteness feature excludes case-marked pronouns from the prescriptive infinitives.

The proposal makes a prediction: A pronoun (overtly case-marked) can never be the subject of the prescriptive infinitive. Up to this point we have assumed that there is some kind of ban on the second person categories for the infinitival participants, since the arguments must be lexical DPs. But we have not considered third person pronouns, which fare no better, compare the authentic (88a) (repeated from (9) above) with the constructed (88b).

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It is pronouns that are the problem, not the person category. And as we have seen, lexical DPs, and more specifically names and name-like nouns such as mamma ‘mother’, as arguments are fully acceptable. What distinguishes pronouns from lexical words is that the latter have no expression of morphological case.Footnote ^{17 ,} Footnote ¹⁸

It should be clear from the above that the term ‘morphological case’ does not mean ‘inherent morphological case’, for which the dative subjects in Icelandic are typical representatives, but ‘structural, morphological case’ (see Sigurðsson Reference Sigurðsson2001). Sigurdsson (Reference Sigurðsson2001:18) stresses that even if an argument has structural case, or is argument-licenced, as he calls it (and which is done via vP), and even if it is a case-marking language, it does not have to mark the argument DPs this way. This can be seen in Icelandic dative subjects, and it can be seen in the prescriptive infinitives. With Legate (Reference Legate2008) it can be assumed that the morphologically unmarked nouns in the prescriptive infinitive are marked by a default case, inserted because the morphological case-marking (and hence the availability of having pronouns), is unavailable. There would then be a sharp distinction between morphological case and no case. Abstract case is not relevant. This is in accordance with the arguments posited by McFadden (Reference McFadden2008) and Sundaresan & McFadden (Reference Sundaresan and McFadden2009).

However, there is an understood subject argument in the prescriptive infinitives even if it is not phonologically realised. We have seen this in the examples where there is a third person reflexive object ((54), (55) and (57), Section 3.3.3), which must mean that the subject argument is third person. Prescriptive infinitives would have a PRO that is controlled, not by an explicitly mentioned argument, but by the arguments provided by the speech act: speaker, addressee and performer.

The imperative force in C assigns participants of the event, and the phonological realisation of their person values depends on whether they are pronounced or not. Table 2 summarises the person features for both imperatives and prescriptive infinitives.

Table 2. Assignment of person to the subject and object arguments of finite imperatives and prescriptive infinitives.

6.3 Infinitives, future tense and context roles

It has been discussed in the literature whether infinitives have tense and in what way. Wurmbrand (Reference Wurmbrand2014) argues that infinitives do not have tense, even the type that has usually been called (from Stowell Reference Stowell1982 to Landau Reference Landau1999, Reference Landau2000) future irrealis infinitive, (89a), in contrast to the propositional (89b):

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   1. a. Leo decided to read a book.

   2. b. Leo believes Julia to be a princess.

   (Wurmbrand Reference Wurmbrand2014:404)

The future infinitive has been held to have the following characteristics: It has tense, controlled subject, null case, episodic interpretation. Landau also adds agreement to this list. The infinitives that are tenseless from a traditional point of view, have ECM subjects, and cannot have episodic interpretation.

Wurmbrand shows (Reference Wurmbrand2014:410) that it is wrong to assume that there is a built in future tense in the future infinitives, since it is possible to use them for past events, as in (90a), contrasting with the finite clause in (90b). This shows that infinitives have relative tense, while finite verbs have an absolute tense.

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   1. a. Leo decided a week ago to go to the party yesterday.

   2. b. Leo decided a week ago that he will go to the party (*yesterday).

   (Wurmbrand Reference Wurmbrand2014: 411)

Wurmbrand suggests, following Abusch (Reference Abusch1985, Reference Abusch and Borer1988), that future is a composite category, involving a future modal woll. This way the tense of infinitives can be relative, as we have seen they are – note past tense in (90a). In (91) below, the difference between finite and non-finite future is depicted. Note the absence of the TP projection in the non-finite future.

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Unlike other infinitives, prescriptive infinitives (and the imperatives) refer to an absolute future. Wurmbrand (Reference Wurmbrand2014) does not discuss imperatives or prescriptive infinitives. However, imperatives must be finite, and must have an absolute, not relative, future. But finite imperatives cannot have a morphological merger of T_[pres] and woll into will, as she proposes. Her idea is well suited for declarative finite clauses, where this merger can actually be spelt out as will in sentences like (90b). It seems less suitable as an analysis of a sentence type like imperatives, which are never spelt out with a modal verb. A possible suggestion is that [+fut] is a feature in T. Abusch's (Reference Abusch, Gueron and Lecarme2004) proposal is semantically rendered as λPλtP(t, ∞), i.e. a point in time unconstrained from time t. Given that imperatives have absolute future, and that child-directed prescriptive infinitives in addition to this have a rather immediate scope, the present author suggests that [+fut] is rendered as a special case of Abusch: λP.P(now, straight after).Footnote ¹⁹

The prescriptive infinitive is derived in a similar way, but without a finiteness feature, and hence nothing that makes this into anything other than an infinitive, albeit with imperative force.

In the present proposal, the category TP is where tense resides and is an anchoring category, with Ritter & Wiltchko (Reference Ritter and Wiltschko2014:1334). The tree in (92), proposed by the present author, is actually the same as their syntactic spine, with the difference that their label is IP rather than TP, which reflects the main argument of their paper; that IP is a very general category that can be instantiated by different language-specific, deictic anchoring contents such as tense, location or participant. In the present proposal it is the imperative force in C that is responsible for the future tense in T, which is very similar to Ritter & Wiltchko (Reference Ritter and Wiltschko2014:1369–1370), who posit that T is valued as [+coincidence] (the event situation coincides with the plan set). The roles of speaker, addressee and performer in (92)–(93) are represented by A, B and C, respectively, following Alcázar & Saltarelli (Reference Alcázar and Saltarelli2014). Notice that it is significant in the present proposal that A and B are not specified as being a particular person (unlike Alcázar & Saltarelli, who posit that A is encoded as 1sg and B as 2sg/2pl, see (86) above). B is usually the same as C, but there are some verbs in which the performer is somebody else, like the Norwegian verb få ‘receive’, see example (11) above, Section 3.1.1, in which the one who receives (= C) is the speaker (= A).

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Ritter & Wiltchko (Reference Ritter and Wiltschko2014:1351–1354) take infinitives to be tenseless and to get their tense from the predicate above. With a feature [+coincidence], the IP of infinitives gets the same tense as the predicate above, while with a [–coincidence] feature, the infinitive must be interpreted as future, see also Wurmbrand's (Reference Wurmbrand2014) account. This is different from the present proposal, in which the future tense in T is determined by the imperative force in C, just as with finite imperatives.

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The finite imperative resides in C, while the infinitive verb resides in T. This explains most of the word order facts as well: Infinitives have categories like adverbs and subjects to their left, while imperatives have these categories to their right.

Eide (Reference Eide, Alexiadou, Hankamer, McFadden, Nuger and Schäfer2009, Reference Eide2011, Reference Eide2016) has developed a classification of Norwegian verb forms according to the minimal features they contain. These are [± Finiteness] and [±Tense]. It seems that [±Irrealis] should be added to this set of features. The irrealis feature in the grammar of Norwegian has been pointed out in recent years by Sandøy (Reference Sandøy1991), Dørum (Reference Dørum2000), Julien (Reference Julien2003) and Eide (Reference Eide2011). The [+Irrealis] feature typically reflects hypothetical or counterfactual meanings, and it has been shown by the authors mentioned that these are morphologically encoded, even in modern Norwegian, which no longer has a fully productive subjunctive. [±Irrealis] is also a category that could be used to unify the two directive types imperatives and prescriptive infinitives. Neither can be used to ascertain that something has actually happened or is actually the case. Rather, they are expressions that contain some uncertainty as to whether the desired event will ever take place. The matrix of Norwegian verb features is thus proposed to be as Table 3.

Table 3. Expanded table of feature distinctions for verbs. (The original distinctions from Eide (Reference Eide, Alexiadou, Hankamer, McFadden, Nuger and Schäfer2009, Reference Eide2011, Reference Eide2016) are shown here in the shaded cells.)

6.4 Word order: The position of negation and subject

As seen in Section 3 (and partly in Sections 4 and 5) above, prescriptive infinitives only have pre-verbal negation, while inflected imperatives have post-verbal negation (though Norwegian also has pre-verbal negation). This implies that finite imperatives move further, possibly to C, due to their finiteness feature. This way they move past the position of negation (adjoined to TP), see Zanuttini (Reference Zanuttini, Belletti and Rizzi1996), Platzack & Rosengren (Reference Platzack and Rosengren1998:213) and Lindstad (Reference Lindstad2007:Chapter 5). Prescriptive infinitives, being non-finite, do not move, and thus the negation ends up being pre-verbal. When Norwegian finite imperatives can also have pre-verbal negation, it may be because they can go to the general topic position of the clause; [Spec, CP]. It is not clear why the other Scandinavian finite imperatives cannot also have a topicalised negation in [Spec, CP]. However, it is known that Norwegian generally allows negation in this position, also in declaratives, not just imperatives.

The same general movement can be assumed to explain the position of the subject: The finite verb moves past it, while the non-finite prescriptive infinitive stays in situ.