Many languages utilize a desiderative affix to express desire. However, some languages, particularly the Quechua languages, have desiderative affixes that express involuntary desire (Hermon, 1985, Cole, 1985, Jake, 1978). Non-volitional desideratives differ systematically from volitional desideratives. In addition to semantic differences, desiderative constructions in Quechua have syntactic differences such as oblique case marking and lack of verbal agreement. Therefore, it is necessary that they be clearly differentiated. I propose the term 'Impulsative' for the non-volitional type. This dissertation investigates the syntax and semantics of impulsatives cross-linguistically.

Impulsatives in the Quechua languages share properties with other constructions in the literature, such as the Involuntary State Construction (Rivero, 2009) present in Albanian (Kallulli, 2006), and the South Slavic languages (Murašič, 2006, Rivero, 2004, Franks, 1995), and causative desideratives in Finnish (Pylkkänen:1999). Like Quechua impulsatives, these constructions also have subjects that lack volition, have oblique case-marking on the subject and do not inflect agreement on the verb. However, there is one striking difference. These languages lack dedicated verbal morphology that indicate 'feel like/be in the mood to V'.

There is a debate in the literature as to whether the impulsative meaning comes from a covert impulsative element (Murašič, 2006) or from other syntactic properties such as being imperfect or non-active (Rivero, 2009, Kallulli, 1999b). I argue that these languages have a covert instantiation of the overt impulsative in Quechua based upon the event and argument structure of impulsatives in each language. I provide a unified semantic denotation of the impulse head. Furthermore, I provide a syntactic structure for impulsatives in each language.