Who benefits from an imperative?

Abstract The distribution of benefits associated with a projected future action has been considered important in determining the type of directive expressed by an imperative. However, there has been little research on how speakers perceive the beneficiary of future action in imperatives and how these perceptions are influenced by the linguistic forms in the imperative utterance. This article reports on an experiment on Czech that tests whether the distinction between imperatives benefiting the speaker and imperatives benefiting the addressee is valid and whether it is influenced by the grammatical person of a modal verb expressing a rationale for the imperative. The results show that imperatives preceded by a first-person modal are judged as benefiting the speaker and imperatives preceded by a second-person modal as benefiting the addressee. The study thus demonstrates how the exact same imperative can be linguistically manipulated to be interpreted as benefiting either the speaker or the addressee.