In linguistics, a vocative or vocative expression is a phrase used to identify the addressee of an utterance. The underlined phrases in each of the following English sentences are examples of vocatives:

, your table is ready. I'm afraid, , that your card has been declined. Quit playing around, .

Syntactically, vocatives are

noun phrase A noun phrase – or NP or nominal (phrase) – is a phrase that usually has a noun or pronoun as its head, and has the same grammatical functions as a noun. Noun phrases are very common cross-linguistically, and they may be the most frequently ...

s which are isolated from the structure of their containing sentence, not being a dependent of the verb. In some languages, vocatives are marked morphologically with a particular

grammatical case A grammatical case is a category of nouns and noun modifiers (determiners, adjectives, participles, and Numeral (linguistics), numerals) that corresponds to one or more potential grammatical functions for a Nominal group (functional grammar), n ...

, the

vocative case In grammar, the vocative case (abbreviated ) is a grammatical case which is used for a noun that identifies a person (animal, object, etc.) being addressed or occasionally for the noun modifiers (determiners, adjectives, participles, and numeral ...

. English lacks a vocative case, but sets vocatives off from their containing sentence in speech by a particular intonational pattern, and in writing by the use of commas.

Function

Traditionally, the function of vocatives has been divided into two main categories: ''calls'' and ''addresses''. A call serves to catch the attention of the person being addressed, or to pick them out from a larger pool of potential addressees, as in the following examples: : Hey, lady, you dropped your piano! : You in the red shirt, get over here. An address merely serves to reiterate, clarify, or emphasize the connection between the speaker and the addressee, as in: : You've made an excellent choice, dear boy. The particular choice of vocative may indicate the relative social status or familiarity of the speakers. For example, ''

sir ''Sir'' is a formal honorific address in English for men, derived from Sire in the High Middle Ages. Both are derived from the old French "" (Lord), brought to England by the French-speaking Normans, and which now exist in French only as part ...

'' and ''

madam Madam (), or madame ( or ), is a polite and formal form of address for Woman, women in the English language, often contracted to ma'am (pronounced in American English and this way but also in British English). The term derives from the French la ...

'' are considered polite terms to use when addressing strangers or, in some cases, those of higher social standing.

References

{{reflist, refs= {{cite journal , title=Hey, whatsyourname! , last=Zwicky, first=Arnold, authorlink=Arnold Zwicky , journal=Chicago Linguistic Society, volume=10, number=78 , year=1974 , url=https://web.stanford.edu/~zwicky/hey-whatsyourname.pdf {{cite journal , title=Vocatives: A Note on Addressee-Management , last=Schaden, first=Gerhard , journal=Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Penn Linguistics Colloquium, volume=16, issue=1 , year=2010 , url=https://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1113&context=pwpl {{cite book , last1=Huddleston , first1=Rodney , title=The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language , last2=Pullum , first2=Geoffrey K. , publisher=Cambridge University Press , year=2002 , isbn=978-0-521-43146-0 , location=Cambridge; New York , page= , author-link=Rodney Huddleston , author-link2=Geoffrey Pullum, pages=522-523 Linguistic units

Function

See also

References