The imperative clause is one of three major sentence types that have been found to be universal across the languages of the world. Compared to declaratives and interrogatives, the imperative type has received comparatively less attention. Using compelling empirical evidence, this cutting-edge study presents a new linguistic theory of imperatives.

In Civilizational Imperatives, Oliver Charbonneau reveals the little-known history of the United States' colonization of the Philippines' Muslim South in the early twentieth century. Often referred to as Moroland, the Sulu Archipelago and the island of Mindanao were sites of intense US engagement and laboratories of colonial modernity during an age of global imperialism. Exploring the complex relationship between colonizer and colonized from the late nineteenth century until the eve of the Second World War, Charbonneau argues that American power in the Islamic Philippines rested upon a transformative vision of colonial rule. Civilization, protection, and instruction became watchwords for US military officers and civilian administrators, who enacted fantasies of racial reform among the diverse societies of the region. Violence saturated their efforts to remake indigenous politics and culture, embedding itself into governance strategies used across four decades. Although it took place on the edges of the Philippine colonial state, this fraught civilizing mission did not occur in isolation. It shared structural and ideological connections to US settler conquest in North America and also borrowed liberally from European and Islamic empires. These circuits of cultural, political, and institutional exchange—accessed by colonial and anticolonial actors alike—gave empire in the Southern Philippines its hybrid character. Civilizational Imperatives is a story of colonization and connection, reaching across nations and empires in its examination of a Southeast Asian space under US sovereignty. It presents an innovative new portrait of the American empire's global dimensions and the many ways they shaped the colonial encounter in the Southern Philippines.

Imperative clauses are recognized as one of the major clause types alongside those known as declarative and interrogative. Nevertheless, they are still an enigma in the study of meaning, which relies largely on either the concept of truth conditions or the concept of information growth—neither of which are easily applied to imperatives. This book puts forward a fresh perspective. It analyzes imperatives in terms of modalized propositions, and identifies an additional, presuppositional, meaning component that makes an assertive interpretation inappropriate. The author shows how these two elements can help explain the varied effects imperatives have, depending on their usage context. Imperatives have been viewed as elusive components of language because they have a range of functions that makes them difficult to unify theoretically. This fresh view of the semantics-pragmatics interface allows for a uniform semantic analysis while accounting for the pragmatic versatility of imperatives.

". . . a more compelling reading of Kant than any I have ever seen." —David Farrell Krell In this provocative book, Alphonso Lingis argues that not only our thought is governed by an imperative, as Kant had maintained, but, rather, our sensual, sensing, perceiving, and emotional life is continually regulated by imperatives that come to us from the world around us. Through a series of phenomenological sketches drawn from life experiences, Lingis shows that there are directives in the natural world and in our interactions with others that govern our thought and behavior.

This volume contains ten articles exploring a wide range of issues in the analysis of the imperative clause from a generative perspective. The language data investigated in detail in the articles come from Dutch, English, German, (old) Scandinavian, Spanish, and South Slavic; there is further significant discussion of data from other Germanic and Romance languages. The phenomena addressed (in several cases in more than one article, leading to some lively debate about contentious issues) include the following: the nature and interpretation of imperative subjects; the properties of participial imperatives; clitic behavior; restrictions on topicalization; word order; null arguments; negative imperatives; and imperatives in embedded clauses. The volume has a substantial introduction, sketching the results of earlier generative work on the topic (most of it scattered across disparate outlets), the issues left open by this earlier work, and the contribution to further insight and understanding made by the book's articles.