The syntactization of kinship in vocative phrases

Abstract

Current studies point out that vocative phrases encode the social relation between speaker and addressee by the interaction of various means, i.e., prosody, lexical options, morpho-syntactic operations. As a contribution to this body of research, this paper focuses on reversed vocatives, and develops two main arguments: (i) vocative phrases provide the default domain for the morpho-syntactic encoding of speaker’s social superiority; and (ii) reversed vocatives are a case in order, where the syntactization of the kinship rank ensures the speaker’s upper-hand in the social relation. Formally, the mapping of the kinship feature entails syntactic head splitting, so the analysis confirms that the derivations concerning the conversational field conform to the general split-and-remerge options available to functional heads (on a par with D, C, T fields).