Vocative!: Addressing Between System and Performance

331 Pages·2013·6.14 MB·English

by  Barbara Sonnenhauser

Barbara Sonnenhauser and Patrizia Noel Aziz Hanna (Eds.)
Vocative!
Trends in Linguistics
Studies and Monographs 261
Editor
Volker Gast
Editorial Board
Walter Bisang
Hans Henrich Hock
Natalia Levshina
Heiko Narrog
Matthias Schlesewsky
Niina Ning Zhang
Editor responsible for this volume
Volker Gast
De Gruyter Mouton
Vocative!
Addressing between System and Performance
edited by
Barbara Sonnenhauser
Patrizia Noel Aziz Hanna
De Gruyter Mouton
ISBN 978-3-11-030389-6
e-ISBN 978-3-11-030417-6
ISSN 1861-4302
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Contents

Introduction: Vocative! 001
Barbara Sonnenhauser and Patrizia Noel Aziz Hanna

The vocative in Georgian 025
Lia Abduladze and Andreas Ludden

Vocative for nominative 043
David Stifter

The vocative and its kin: marking function through prosody 087
Asl(cid:48) Göksel and Markus Pöchtrager

On the structure of vocatives 109
M. Teresa Espinal

Features and strategies: the internal syntax of vocative phrases 133
Virginia Hill

Addressing changes in the Bulgarian vocative 157
Cammeron Girvin

Du Idiot! Din idiot! Pseudo-vocative constructions and insults 189
in German (and Swedish)
Franz D’Avis and Jörg Meibauer

Vocative and the grammar of calls 219
Tore Janson

Mexican güey – from vocative to discourse marker: 235
a case of grammaticalization?
Friederike Kleinknecht
Contents vi
The vocative case between system and asymmetry 269
Margherita Donati

Vocatives as functional performance structures 283
Patrizia Noel Aziz Hanna and Barbara Sonnenhauser

On the case of the vocative 305
Christian Stetter

Language index 319
Subject index 321
Introduction: Vocative!*

Barbara Sonnenhauser and Patrizia Noel Aziz Hanna

Abstract

The vocative has long been neglected in the linguistic literature. There is
still no systematic approach to capturing the diverse language-specific ways
of addressing others. The lack of morphological vocative marking in many
European languages is one of the reasons for this neglect, in addition to the
dual status of vocatives between system and performance. This volume
intends to fill this gap by dealing with the various facets of the vocative
from an onomasiological perspective, with special emphasis on the position
of this phenomenon between system and performance.
In this introduction, the intricate nature of the vocative and the problems
it poses for current linguistic analyses will be outlined. To this end, the
main characteristics of the vocative will be distinguished and an overview
will be given of the main theoretical approaches and lines of argument. In
order to avoid any commitment to a specific theoretical framework, ‘voca-
tives’ will be defined functionally as ‘forms and structures used for direct
address’. This will also allow us to consider ways of marking the vocative
structurally.

1. The ‘vocative’

The onomasiological approach towards the vocative taken in Vocative!
Addressing between system and performance implicates a variety of dif-
fering and diverging concepts, interpretations and theoretical positions
concerning the term ‘vocative’. Traditionally, and depending to a large
degree both on the theoretical approach and the specific language studied,
vocatives are classified either in purely formal terms as part of the language
system, or as functional structures manifesting themselves in language use
only. While the focus of research still lies on languages with morphologi-
cally marked vocatives, increasingly syntactic restrictions, pragmatic fac-
tors, and semantic characteristics are also becoming the focus of attention.
In addition to the focus on morphology, another aspect that may have im-
peded a comprehensive discussion of vocatives in languages without overt
2 Barbara Sonnenhauser and Patrizia Noel Aziz Hanna
vocative marking is their position between system and performance. Fur-
thermore, most approaches refer to only one specific aspect of the vocative
– i.e. its form (phonology, morphology, syntax) or function (address, call) –
and take this aspect as the crucial and defining one.
As used within this article, the term ‘vocative’ is a mere label for lin-
guistic addressing phenomena, without any commitment to specific theo-
retical assumptions or positions. This pretheoretical approximation is ne-
cessary considering the various possible definitions, theoretical treatments
and language specific studies of this phenomenon in terms of its category
status, its structure and function, etc. A few definitions shall suffice to
demonstrate the impact of the theoretical background – predominantly for-
mal or predominantly functional – on the classification of vocatives.
Zwicky (1974: 787) defines the vocative in English by stating that it is “set
off from the sentence it occurs in by special intonation […] and it doesn’t
serve as an argument of a verb in this sentence”. In emphasizing the voca-
tive’s syntactic non-integration and its non-argument status, Zwicky’s defi-
nition is primarily a syntactic one. Levinson (1983: 71) regards vocatives as
“an interesting grammatical category”, leaving open, however, what exactly
he means by a grammatical category in terms of its systematic status. He
then goes on to focus on the non-integrated nature of vocatives, defining
them as “noun phrases that refer to the addressee, but are not syntactically
or semantically incorporated as the arguments of a predicate; they are rather
set apart prosodically from the body of the sentence that may accompany
them”. A more functional definition is given by Betsch and Berger (2009:
1023), who regard the vocative as ‘a traditional means of marking nominal
forms of address’ (“traditionelles Mittel zur Markierung nominaler Anrede-
formen”).
A functional approach is also taken by Daniel and Spencer (2009: 626),
who define the vocative as “a form used for calling out and attracting or
maintaining the addressee`s attention […] by using a term referring to
[her]”. Lambrecht (1996: 267) describes the function of vocatives as ser-
ving “to call the attention of an addressee, in order to establish or maintain
a relationship between this addressee and some proposition”. In his attempt
to give an exclusively semantic definition, Schaden (2010: 176) is con-
cerned with vocatives “in a narrow sense”, i.e. with “noun-phrases that
identify or describe the addressee” and do not have any further, non-voca-
tive functions. He considers “vocatives alone and in isolation”, leaving
aside “components of the meaning of vocatives that are not rooted in the
linguistic system (i.e., Saussure’s langue), but that seem to stem exclu-
sively from the use that speakers make in context of that system” (Schaden
Introduction: Vocative! 3
2010: 176). He classifies only NPs identifying or describing the addressee
as vocatives. Other cases, such as pronominal expressions or formulae like
the beginning of the Lord’s Prayer – Our Father in heaven – can optionally
be regarded as vocatives (Schaden 2010: 176). This seems to suggest that
he assumes some kind of inherent feature marking certain NPs unambigu-
ously as ‘vocative’.1 Moreover, he arrives at the conclusion that there are
“three semantic functions” of vocatives (Schaden 2010: 183): identifica-
tion, predication and activation. This differentiation is based on the ques-
tion of “whether the (group of) addressee(s) is presupposed to be already
established (this is the case with predicative and activational vocatives), or
whether the addressee still has to be established as such (identificational
vocatives)” (2010: 184). In regarding ‘semantic’ as “the part of meaning
that is linguistically encoded” (2010: 176), Schaden’s approach amounts to
‘vocative’ being an inherent semantic feature of specific NPs (not only
nouns) and, as a consequence, to NPs being systematically ambiguous
between vocative and non-vocative uses.

What these and other definitions (cf. Fink 1972) show is the non-distinct
nature of vocative categorisation – it is regarded as a formal category, a
functional structure, a semantic component or as a mere element of usage.
The vagueness of the term also accounts for the fact that, contrary to
their importance in communication, and even though they are amongst the
most basic and earliest acquired structures of language, vocatives have
hardly ever been discussed in all their facets from a linguistic point of view.
This is pointed out, e.g., by Levinson (1983: 71), who notes that
“[v]ocatives in general are […] underexplored”, and Floricic (2002: 151),
who states that “force est de reconnaître que les études consacrées
spécifiquement au vocative sont assez rares; à quelques exceptions près,
tout au plus dispose-t-on à ce sujet d’observations fragmentaires et
éparses”. Hock (2006) stresses the neglect of vocatives in the linguistic
discussion and particularly of their functional aspects. He ascribes this to
the focus of traditional grammar on the status of the vocative within the
case system, which means that the function of directly addressing an
interlocutor is not duly taken into account.
The lack of interest in the syntactic and semantic aspects of vocatives in
“traditional and generative grammar” is also noted by Lambrecht (1996:
267). He sees the reason for this in “the inherently deictic nature of voca-
tives and […] their grammatical status as non-arguments”. Due to their
non-argument status, vocatives “can be omitted from a sentence without