Implicatures of proper name vocatives in English

Abstract

Proper name vocatives sometimes induce implicatures. The phenomenon is probably well-known but not necessarily easy to explain in a pragmatically consistent fashion. The reason is that the same kind of name vocative yields implicatures in one occasion but sounds quite neutral in another. The goal of this paper is to advance a system by which we can predict when a given name vocative engenders implicatures in English. The system is based on the concept of conventional implicature, one of the three types of implicature delineated by Grice (1961, 1975, 1989). There is a special kind of conventional implicature inducer in which implicature is not directly encoded in a lexical item but in a contrastive pair of lexical items (like vous and tu in French). I propose that a set of competing proper name vocatives, namely, the full name, the (title plus) family name, the first name and the shortened first name (of a given addressee), is taken as one of those contrastive conventional implicature inducers. By capitalizing on Terkourafi's (2001; 2005a, 2008, 2009, 2012) concept of conventionalization (standardization), I develop a theory in which private level linguistic habits play a crucial role in inducing implicatures of proper name vocatives.