In this paper, we examine an understudied pairing between a sentence type and a terminal contour: imperatives with the downstepped level terminal contour, which we call DLT. We establish that DLT is systematically associated with a subset of imperative uses that cut across the traditional illocutionary distinctions, and that the felicity of DLT imperatives is further dependent on certain contextual information. We also demonstrate that DLT imperatives contribute a diverse range of social and interactional meanings. To understand these empirical patterns, we posit two independent conventions that have a cumulative effect: the sentence type convention for imperatives and the intonational convention for DLT, which indexes certain aspects of the context.