On definiteness and person in Romanian vocatives

Abstract

We investigate the correlations between the various morphosyntactic types of Romanian vocatives (+/- vocative-morphology, +/- definiteness) and the main types of vocative uses – addresses, evaluative, selecting calls and non-selecting calls (where ‘selecting calls’ by and large correspond to Schaden’s (2010) identificational vocatives). The Romanian data show that selecting calls and evaluative vocatives have structural properties that distinguish them from the other vocatives (used in addresses and non-selecting calls). Identificational vocatives, which are used when an addresee is selected from a larger group of potential addresees, involve a special Voc head that selects a definite DP, which may be unmarked for Person when the DP is nominal but is necessarily marked as 2nd person, via agreement, when the DP is pronominal. Morphologically-marked vocatives and [-def] vocatives obligatorily carry 2nd person. All four morphosyntactic patterns are available for addresses and non-selecting calls, the choice of one particular pattern being subject to lexical restrictions. We argue that morphological Vocative marking involves movement to the Voc-layer, as opposed to unmarked vocatives. Evaluative vocatives are obligatorily Voc-marked definites. We attribute the obligatory Voc-marking to the fact that for evaluative vocatives, the assignment of the NP property to the Addressee is new information. The specialization of the definite vocative-marked form for the evaluative use is explained as a morphological peculiarity of the nominalizing suffix that we postulate for evaluative adjectives, under the assumption that this suffix is also present with non-derived nouns used as evaluative predicates.