This projection plays a role both in preventing the instantiation of a predication relation between the subject and the predicate, and, when sufficiently local, in licensing the special syntactic properties of the subject. On the theoretical side, it argues that the syntactic representation of imperatives contains a functional projection not present in other clause types. On the empirical side, this paper provides a comprehensive discussion of these properties that makes sense of the sometimes contradictory observations found in the literature. Imperative subjects in English are puzzling in several respects: null subjects are possible with a definite interpretation, unlike in other clause types quantificational subjects are often restricted to range over a set containing the addressee and exhibit binding possibilities not readily available to them in declaratives and interrogatives and third person referential subjects are for most speakers limited to bare noun phrases.
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