Gerund imperatives

I argue that prescriptive infinitives, as directed at children (Johannessen 2015), and generic imperatives, as encountered in public notices and instructions, have the same syntax. Both are infinitival, and both exhibit similar order and person restrictions. These restrictions result from lacking clausal structure above vP. Instead, prescriptive infinitives and generic imperatives are nominal, embedded under D. The division between such gerund imperatives and standard finite imperatives motivates a generative emergentist approach to Universal Grammar (Biberauer 2014).