23/10/2025 Marianthi Koraka (Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen)

Imperative sentences exhibit specific properties, such as subject omission, resistance to combine with sentential negation and non-embeddability (Han 2001; Aikhenvald 2010). With respect to their meaning, the imperative sentence type can express different meanings (imperative speech acts), such as commands, pleas, permissions etc. (Portner 2007, Kaufmann 2011; Condoravdi and Lauer 2012). First studies on sign languages suggest that the imperative sentence type is marked by manual and non-manual elements as well as by manual prosody (Donati et al. 2017; Brentari et al. 2018). I discuss recent data from two sign languages, namely German SL (DGS) and Greek SL (GSL) that come from semi-controlled production tasks. I show that imperative speech acts in both languages are marked by specific manual elements and clusters of non-manual markers. Then we will discuss some syntactic properties of imperative speech acts in GSL, and show that they display true sentential subjects and use the same negator as declarative sentences. I will argue that GSL, lacks an imperative sentence type and rather uses the declarative sentence type with an imperative non-prototypical force in order to express imperative meanings.