Abrams, don't bark!
It rained, Abrams.

Vocatives are noun phrases used as modifiers of sentences which refer to the addressee and do not fill a semantic role with respect to any predicate in the sentence. Rather, vocatives function to explicitly mark the addressee of a sentence. Leech (1999) identifies three general types of pragmatic function for such explicit marking: summoning attention, clarifying intended addressee, and establishing/maintaining social relationships.

In addition to the imperative and declarative clauses illustrated in the testsuite examples, vocatives can also attach to questions, and sentence fragments, as shown below.

• Sir, are you alright?

• Abrams, what do you remember?

• That one, Abrams.

• Thanks, Abrams.

These examples also illustrate the use of forms such as Sir and Madam as vocatives. (Leech (1999) points out that such items are marginal NPs, and somewhat specialized to the vocative usage.) Epithets can also be used as vocatives:

• Watch what you're doing, butterfingers.

Vocatives as analyzed by the ERG are characterized by the presence of the addressee predicate, linking the instance from the NP to the situation denoted by the rest of the sentence:

  addressee[ARG1 x, ARG2 e]

• Because vocatives don't contribute to truth conditions, but rather serve pragmatic functions, this phenomenon is classified in our pages as ‘quasi-semantic’.

• Leech (1999) notes that in addition to NPs, adjectives can be used as vocatives (as in, Don't bark, silly!). These don't current give rise to vocative in the ERG's analysis. Should they?

• Leech also notes that NPs beyond proper nouns can function as vocatives:

  • It's alright, my dear.

  • Those of you who want to bring your pets along, please pay attention.

• ERG 1212 (demo) doesn't parse: That one, Abrams! => Works in trunk

• The ERG currently allows for sentence-initial and -final vocatives, but not those that interrupt a sentence. The latter are, we found, characteristic of Sir Conan Doyle's representation of dialogue.

• For parallelism with other modifiers, should we switch ARG1 and ARG2? => Yes, Dan will change.

• Leech doesn't consider imperative subjects to be vocatives, though he notes that the distinction is not clear. I couldn't get an imperative subject example (e.g. Everyone bark!) to parse. Are these meant to be handled?

• 1212

• Leech, G. (1999). The distribution and function of vocatives in American and British English conversation. LANGUAGE AND COMPUTERS, 26, 107-120.

• ErgSemantics main page

• Inventory of semantic phenomena (to be) documented

• How to cite this work