In this article, we consider legal notices of various forms, including imperative, indicative, and non-sentential. We argue that these convey various illocutionary forces depending on their particular content. In particular, those that prohibit actions — unlike laws that do so — typically have “directive” illocutionary force, with different linguistic classes of legal notices achieving this force through different means, given their distinct linguistic properties. We propose a “bare phrase” treatment of non-sentential notices, whereby these are underlyingly and not just superficially non-sentential; and a semantic treatment in terms of Discourse Representation Theory, which perspicuously describes their contribution to interpretation. Finally, we argue that assigning such sparse syntactic and semantic representations to non-sentential notices has conceptual and empirical advantages over analyses that posit richer underlying structure, capturing a broader range of data, including patterns involving default case and the absence of articles, and minimizing the need to posit linguistic ambiguity.
