Most formal research on the imperative sentence type has focused on canonical imperatives, forms like Leave!, which are often characterized across languages by properties such as bare verbal morphology and omission of the subject. Noncanonical imperatives therefore offer an opportunity to investigate imperative properties from a different perspective. This article argues that negation-licensed commands, forms like No smoking!, first introduced in Iatridou 2021, contain an unusual combination of properties that offer a unique insight into the nature of canonical imperatives. This article has two main findings: (i) negation-licensed commands have a morphosyntax similar to that of existential declaratives, but a speech-act update similar to that of canonical imperatives, and (ii) their speech-act update is subtly different from canonical imperatives in a way that motivates a reevaluation of the speech-act operator in canonical imperatives. This article therefore demonstrates that noncanonical constructions are worth studying not only because of their interesting properties, but also because they offer insights into canonical constructions that could not be gathered otherwise.

In Spanish, the element todo ‘all’ agrees in gender and number with the noun it quantifies over (todas las ventanas ‘all.F.PL the.F.PL windows.F.PL'). In this article I discuss a novel construction in Rioplatense Spanish, restricted to existentials and possessives, in which todo agrees in gender and number with a given nominal in the structure but is neither syntactically nor semantically related to it (e.g. Hay toda agua en el baño (have.PRS all.F.SG water.F.SG in the bathroom) ‘There's water over the whole bathroom floor'). I argue that the syntax and the interpretation of this construction can be explained only if todo ‘all’ is understood to be modifying a silent element (in the sense of Kayne 2004). In particular, I propose that todo is the modifier of a PP headed by the silent preposition WITH, and that the nominal that agrees with todo is the complement of this silent P. This analysis sheds light on the structure of existential sentences and supports the view put forth in Levinson 2011, contra Freeze 1992, that a single underlying structure for possessive structures cannot be maintained.