1 The Role of Context in Imperative Form Choice Scott A. Schwenter and Mark Hoff The Ohio State University When languages have more than one dedicated imperative, the distinct forms often correspond to different person/number combinations. But what happens when there is variation between two forms for the same person/number combination, e.g. 2nd person singular? This chapter analyzes the competing 2SG imperatives in Brazilian Portuguese (BP), which illustrate this situation. BP permits this option in both affirmative and negative contexts, where the historical imperative tu form for 2SG alternates with the 3SG present subjunctive form used with the 2SG pronoun você (cf. Lamberti & Schwenter 2018). Through the multivariate analysis of an experimental survey, we argue that the variation between the two forms can be accounted for in terms of the semantic-pragmatic notion of presumed settledness (Hoff 2019), i.e. speaker confidence about how the future will unfold, and can be operationalized in terms of contextual characteristics such as markers of temporal immediacy and addressee specificity. More broadly, we suggest that these characteristics are relevant to accounting for contrasts between imperative forms across languages such as those with "delayed/deferred imperatives" (Aikhenvald 2014). 1. Introduction It is well known that imperatives are highly dependent on and interact with a number of features of the context, such as the speaker, the addressee, the setting, etc. (Jary & Kissine 2014: 9). 1 However, in most well-studied languages that have more than one dedicated imperative form, it is typically a function of person and/or number. Thus, for instance, in Spanish, there are distinct affirmative imperative forms depending on the person/number of the addressee(s), and these are associated with differences of social distance among the interlocutors (e.g. tú is the "informal" 2SG subject pronoun, while usted is the "formal" 2SG 1 For collaboration on prior versions of this research, we thank Luana Lamberti (see Lamberti & Schwenter 2018). For comments on the conference presentation, we thank Patrícia Amaral and Manuel Pérez Saldanya. Last but not least, we thank Susana Rodríguez Rosique, Jordi Antolí Martínez, and the other organizers of the Verb and Context conference for their superior organization and patience with tardy authors.