The Conditional Expressed by Russian and English Imperatives

This paper examines a non-canonical usage of Russian imperatives, i.e., when they express counterfactual conditional semantics. Comparing such Russian imperatives with English imperative constructions which also exhibit the properties of a conditional to some extent, I show that the English sentences are to be considered imperatives despite their partial conditional interpretation, whereas the Russian ones are true conditionals. I give a syntactic and semantic account for Russian imperatives functioning as conditionals, and show the structural differences between conditional-type imperatives and canonical imperatives in order to account for their distinct properties.