Vocatives and the pragmatics–syntax interface

Abstract

This paper argues that vocatives are visible to syntactic computation. The investigation relates the behaviour of vocatives (forms of direct address) to the behaviour of exclamative expressions (forms of indirect address) and to the pragmatic markers for speech acts. The results support current proposals for a predicative structure at the pragmatics–syntax interface and point to further refinements of the theoretical framework. In particular, the parallel treatment of vP shells and Speech ActP shells is extended to the relation between Case and syntactic positions, yielding a distinction between two Cases in the pragmatic field: Exclamative Case for DPs of indirect address, and Vocative Case for DPs of direct address. In this framework, the syntactic and the pragmatic fields undergo similar operations for licensing DPs in argument positions.