X-bar Theoryunderstood in this sentence: you! An imperative cannot be interpreted as a command
given to some third person and must be interpreted as directed towards the addressee.
The question is then, what is the status of the subject of such sentences: are they only
‘understood’, present at some semantic level or are they merely ‘unpronounced’
though present at the grammatical level?
There is reason to believe that language makes much use of unpronounced
elements that are nonetheless present grammatically and we will see many examples of
such things in the following pages. One argument to support the assumption of an
unpronounced subject in (13) comes from observations concerning the behaviour of
reflexive pronouns such as himself. Unlike other pronouns, reflexives must refer to
something else in the same sentence:
(14) a Sue said Fred fancies himself
b Sue said Fred fancies her
In (14a) himself can only be interpreted as referring to Fred and cannot, for
example, be taken to mean someone else not mentioned in the sentence. Compare this
to the behaviour of her in (14b). In this case the pronoun may either be taken as
referring to Sue or to some other woman. We can say therefore that reflexive pronouns
must have grammatical antecedents: some element present in the sentence which
provides the reflexive with its reference. With this in mind, consider the following
observations
(15) a Pete ate the pie by himself
b Pete ate the pie by itself
(16) a eat the pie by yourself!
b Pete ate
c *Pete ate by itself
As we see from (15), a by phrase containing a reflexive is interpreted to mean
‘unaccompanied’. In (15a), the reflexive refers to Pete and so it means that he was
unaccompanied in eating the pie. In contrast, in (15b) the reflexive refers to the pie and
so it means that the pie was unaccompanied (by ice cream for example) when Pete ate
it. (16a) is grammatical even though there is no apparent antecedent for the reflexive.
It is not surprising that the reflexive should be yourself however, as, as we have said,
the understood subject of an imperative is you. Yet we cannot simply say that the
antecedent ‘being understood’ is enough to satisfy the requirements of the reflexive as
(16c) is ungrammatical. In this case the object is absent, though it is clearly understood
that something was eaten in (16b). But this understanding is not enough to license the
use of the reflexive in this case. So we conclude that the missing subject in (16a) is
different from the missing object in (16c) and in particular that the missing subject has
a more definite presence than the missing object. This would be so if the missing
subject were present as an unpronounced grammatical entity while the missing object
is absent grammatically and present only at the semantic level. In conclusion then,
while imperatives might look like VP clauses which lack subjects, they are in fact full
clauses with unpronounced subjects.