Resumen de English Imperatival Speech Acts
Departing from the ambiguity and semantic complexity of many imperative sentences, it is argued in this paper that their meaning should properly be studied within the domain of pragmatics. It is not an adequate solution to analyse imperatives as truth-value declaratives nor by transforming them into their corresponding performatives. To the sense and denotation brought about by a syntactic and semantic approach, there must be added other factors concerning context and conversational implicature. This treatment reveals many subtle shades of the illocutionary force of imperatival speech acts, such as will, power, authority, intention, interest and axiological potentiality.
