The reality status of directives and its coding across languages

In languages in which there is an opposition between realis and irrealis markers, directives (i.e. forms encoding positive directive situations: imperatives, hortatives, jussives, etc.) happen to be encoded by irrealis markers, by realis markers, by both, or they may be neutral with respect to this distinction. This apparently messy behaviour raises the question of what the use of (ir)realis markers in directives means, and, more generally, of how relevant reality status as such is to the coding of directive situations across languages. In this paper, we propose an explanation for the cross-linguistic behaviour of directives with respect to (ir)realis marking based on diachrony and on the functional components of the directive situation: after identifying the commonest diachronic sources of directives, we argue that the distinction between actualized and unactualized states of affairs is not directly relevant to the cross-linguistic coding of directive situations, but it may be relevant to the coding of other functional domains, which in turn provide the main diachronic sources for directive constructions. In other words, the presence of (ir)realis markers (or their absence) is to be explained simply as one of the possible morphosyntactic properties of the source construction, which tends to be maintained also in the target, not as the manifestation of an inherent realis, irrealis or hybrid nature of directive situations. Moreover, the extension of a source construction to the coding of directive situations is not motivated by the logical irreality shared by the source and the target function, but is based on more local semantic similarities between the source and the target construction that are independent of the notion of (un)actualized state of affairs as such.