28.3545, Review: Pragmatics; Syntax: Sonnenhauser, Hanna (2016)

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Subject: 28.3545, Review: Pragmatics; Syntax: Sonnenhauser, Hanna (2016)

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Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2017 12:47:09
From: Susan Burt [smburt at ilstu.edu]
Subject: Vocative!

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/27/27-4641.html

EDITOR: Barbara  Sonnenhauser
EDITOR: Patrizia Noel  Aziz Hanna
TITLE: Vocative!
SUBTITLE: Addressing between System and Performance
SERIES TITLE: Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs [TiLSM]
PUBLISHER: De Gruyter Mouton
YEAR: 2016

REVIEWER: Susan Meredith Burt, Illinois State University

REVIEWS EDITOR: Robert A. Coté

SUMMARY 

Since at least the 1960s, with the publications of Brown and Ford (1964) and
Brown and Gilman (1970), to more recent volumes devoted to the topic (Clyne,
Norrby and Warren 2009; Norrby and Wide 2015), some linguists have focused on
the social psychological, socio-pragmatic meta-messages that hearers and
addressees derive from address term choices, concerning perceptions of power
relationships, insider or outsider status, social distance or closeness.
Discussions of appropriate referring forms and address forms to use
with/to/about persons of different gender identities continue as notions of
gender evolve.  Research on address in the academic world is readily available
(see references in Burt 2015 for just a sampling). This volume, entitled
“Vocative! Addressing Between System and Performance” by Barbara Sonnenhausen
and Patrizia Noel Aziz Hanna, however, scarcely touches on these things. 
Rather, vocative phenomena, that is, address and calls, are analyzed here in
the interests of understanding their position in language as both langue and
parole/discours, system and practice, with an eye to understanding how system
affects practice and practice affects system.

In the opening chapter, “Introduction: Vocative!”, Sonnenhausen and Noel Aziz
Hanna motivate devoting a volume to this particular linguistic phenomenon:
vocatives, long neglected, challenge a componential view of language, since
their expression and  identification may take place through morphological,
syntactic, or intonational means; vocatives are defined as “forms and
structures used for direct address” (p.1), yet the category is not
particularly distinct. Vocatives may be marked morphologically, for example,
yet still not be seen as part of the case system because they are not
syntactic arguments of the verb; and in many cases, they are not marked even
morphologically.  The lack of syntactic integration into the sentence, on the
other hand, may sometimes combine with prosodic marking to render vocatives
recognizable. Zwicky’s (1974) distinction between vocatives’ call and address
functions contributes to functional approaches to vocatives: a call attempts
to catch the addressee’s attention, while an address serves to maintain or
emphasize the ongoing contact between speaker and addressee. Thus, vocatives
manifest morphological, syntactic, intonational, and functional variation
across and within languages, which makes them of interest.

In Chapter 2, “The vocative in Georgian,” Lia Abuladze and Andreas Ludden show
that the vocative in Georgian is not always morphologically distinct from the
nominative, and the marking of the vocative is variable; nevertheless, because
it can serve to distinguish a vocative-cum-imperative from a third-person
imperative (as in “Somebody call a doctor!”), the vocative must be recognized
in Georgian as syntactic as well as pragmatic and morphological.

In Chapter 3, “Vocative for Nominative,” David Stifter examines 24 different
cases of proposed “VpN” (Vocatiuus pro Nominatiuo), in which a vocative form
takes on nominative function. He concludes that VpN arises primarily from
language contact situations, typically from a donor language (like Latin) with
a vocative form to a recipient language (like Etruscan) without a vocative
category. Given names of humans and the names of deities are the most likely
to undergo VpN.

Chapter 4, “The vocative and its kin: marking function through prosody,” by
Asli Göksel and Markus Pöchtrager examines Turkish and Austrian German. 
Typologically different and genetically unrelated, both languages lack a
segmentally marked Vocative, yet both have similar intonation patterns
(“tunes”) for vocative and related functions; the authors suggest these tunes
be considered morphological.

Two chapters, written within the generative/minimalist framework, analyze the
syntactic structure of vocatives.  M. Teresa Espinal argues in Chapter 5, “The
structure of vocatives,” that vocatives are not restricted to the syntactic
periphery (a claim Christian Stetter also takes up and argues against in his
chapter), that vocative phrases may contain a vocative particle (O, hey, ei,
etc.), and that despite the lack of a verb in a vocative structure, vocatives
“can be arguments of nominal predicational structures” (p.111), and in that
way resemble copular sentences, in that they can have identity,
identificational, or predicational types. Virginia Hill continues the argument
in Chapter 6, “Features and strategies: the internal syntax of vocative
phrases,” with a comparison of the syntactic structure of vocative phrases and
that of noun phrases. Her goal is to argue that functional features such as
[specificity] and [inter-personal] are encoded in vocative phrases, and rather
than being confined to the syntax-phonology interface, are visible in
syntactic computations.  Vocative particles, optional in some languages,
obligatory in others, may be one vehicle for these functional features;
constraints on the appearance of definite articles in vocative phrases is
another way of differentiating vocative phrases from noun phrases. In
addition, in some languages, allocutive agreement—syntactic or morphological
features that reflect the gender/number/status of the addressee—serves as
evidence that features of the speaking situation enter into syntax. 

In Chapter 7, Cammeron Girvin, in “Addressing changes in the Bulgarian
vocative,” finds that the perception and evaluation of Bulgarian vocatives may
vary by addressee gender, gender of evaluator, age, and native dialect;
vocatives are now perceived as more marked than they were considered in
pre-twentieth century grammars. While some of this marking is
negative—vocatives may be heard as rude, folksy or vulgar—vocatives may also
convey closeness or intimacy. Girvin’s survey of speaker evaluations of
vocative forms shows that the –o vocative of many female names is often
perceived as impolite, while the –e vocative characteristic of many male names
is perceived as somewhat less so. On the other hand, older speakers perceive
the use of a non-vocative name for address as trendy. The system, Girvin
concludes, is in flux. 

In Chapter 8, “Du Idiot! Din idiot: Pseudo-vocative constructions and insults
in German (and Swedish),” Franz D’Avis and Jörg Meibauer, following Zwicky
1974, distinguish between the call function of vocatives (Anruf) and the
address/confirmation function (Anrede).  In the first, the vocative form “is
used to get the attention of a selected addressee, [and] …marks/identifies the
selected addressee” (p.195); these functions establish a communication
situation or C-situation. In the confirmation function of vocatives, the
C-situation is considered already established, although confirmation vocatives
may also include relational or expressive functions, characterizing the
relationship between speaker and addressee or expressing the speaker’s
characterization of the addressee. This distinction between these functions of
the vocative is crucial for the distinction D’Avis and Meibauer make here
between vocatives and du-vocatives.  While several forms of vocatives seem to
work well in either call or confirmation function, vocative particles such as
‘hey’ do not appear in confirmation vocatives, and du-vocatives seem not to
appear in calls. Du-vocatives also show restrictions on their syntactic
distribution in comparison with other noun phrases; furthermore, the
construction seems to carry the force of insult inherently; for these reasons,
the authors distinguish du-vocatives from others and label them
pseudo-vocatives.

Chapter 9 by Tore Janson, “Vocative and the grammar of calls,” surveys a wide
range of languages in order to find generalizations of what the author labels
“calls,” which are the type of non-sentence utterances in which vocatives may
be found. Janson points out that vocatives are different from other
case-markings on nouns, since the vocative is not a sentence constituent.
These non-sentence utterances may be marked by special intonation and/or by
special particles (“Oh, Susan!”), and those particles may be independent or
may attach to the noun designating the addressee of the call. The noun itself
may or may not be marked; while some languages may mark all eligible nouns,
others may manifest marking only on certain subcategories of nouns.

Friederike Kleinknecht’s Chapter 10, “Mexican güey—from vocative to discourse
marker: a case of grammaticalization?” traces this word’s lexical history.
Thought to be a variant of  “buey,” ‘ox’, the word seems to have originated as
an insult, but then took a trajectory of amelioration, first becoming a
solidarity marker, and then, through frequent use, a discourse marker.  Rather
than label this particular path as grammaticalization or pragmaticization,
Kleinknecht proposes the term routinization for this process. 

In Chapter 11, “The vocative case between system and asymmetry,” Margherita
Donati summarizes the scope of Western grammarians’ thoughts about vocatives. 
She argues that while most noun cases are referential and third person, the
vocative shifts the noun in question to second person.  “The deictic category
of person emerges as one of the interface areas which actually show the
impossibility of separating language as a system (langue) from language as an
activity (discours)” (p.275). Vocatives here are not semantic-syntactic, but
pragmatic in their function as shifters of nouns to deictic elements.

Noel Asiz Hanna and Sonnenhauser return in the penultimate chapter to argue
that vocatives are “functional performance structures,” recognizable
linguistic elements which are not syntactically integrated into sentences, but
have indexical function within them.  Other examples of functional performance
structures include parentheticals and citations. Instead of seeing vocatives
as part of the paradigmatic aspect of language, the authors argue that greater
cross-language understanding of vocatives can be achieved by seeing them as
syntagmatic in nature.  Minimal pair sentences like these illustrate how
prosodic marking makes distinguishing vocatives possible:

Ich erkläre Mika gleich, worum es geht.  ‘I’ll explain to Mika right away,
what it’s about.’

Ich erkläre, Mika, gleich, worum es geht, ‘I’ll explain right away, Mika, what
it’s about.’ (p. 296; my translations)

While position of the name ‘Mika’ in the first sentence enables us to read it
as indirect object, the pauses in the second sentence serve to clarify the
lack of syntactic integration of ‘Mika’ into the rest of the sentence; ‘Mika’
here is, of course, the vocative. 

Christian Stetter, in the final chapter of the volume, asks again questions
which motivate the volume as a whole: “(1) Where is the vocative located in
the whole of language articulation systems? (2) Does it belong to the language
system or to performance—or isn’t it an either-or in this case?” (p. 306)
Stetter argues that the notion that the vocative must be syntactically
external or marginal to the sentence does not hold; he gives a series of
examples with the vocative element between sentence constituents, such as
‘Kannst Du mir Paul eine neue Parkmarke zuweisen’, arguing that there are
several places within the sentence where the vocative can occur, as long as it
follows the rheme, the rheme of any individual utterance being a function of
discourse context. Address, Stetter argues, is not a syntactic function, and
thus, vocative cannot be a syntactic category; rather, it is a speech act
type, as well as a speech act.  The vocative phenomenon retains its position
between system and use, and its consequent claim to our interest and further
study. 

EVALUATION

The strength of this volume lies in the wide range of approaches used and
languages examined in the pursuit of what seems at first a very narrowly
defined linguistic phenomenon, and at that, one that has been seen as marginal
to the traditionally central concerns of grammar, verbs and their arguments.
Phonological/intonational, morphological, and syntactic arguments are brought
to bear on the status of vocatives within the language system; close
examination of the vocative phenomenon from different angles allows us to
place seemingly paradoxical results side by side. For example, even though
vocatives are not arguments of a verb, the papers here should give pause to
anyone who wants to argue that they are not at least partially syntactic
phenomena. While vocatives may manifest their own syntactic structure, as Hill
makes clear, Stetter’s paper argues against seeing vocatives as a syntactic
category; he sees them as a speech act type. It is left to the reader to
reconcile these different results from different approaches. The reader can
enjoy putting these different results together and examining how the papers
speak to each other, but a summary chapter, perhaps by the editors, could have
made the chapters’ mutual relevance and their collective implications for the
mapping of boundaries or components of the language system more explicit. The
theoretical boundary between language system and usage also comes under
tentative attack here: speakers also shape their language systems. It is hard
not to wonder after reading Girvin’s paper, for example, whether the
ambivalence Bulgarian speakers express about vocative forms (are they vulgar
or not?) may eventually result in the loss of overt marking of the category in
that language. The career of Mexican ‘guey’ shows further how usage can change
function.  Vocatives emerge in this volume as phonological/intonational,
morphological, syntactic, pragmatic, as well as socio-pragmatic discourse
elements.  I would expect linguists of all stripes to find something here of
interest.

REFERENCES

Brown, Roger and Marguerite Ford.  1964. Address in American English.  In
Language in Culture and Society, Dell Hymes (ed.), 234-244. New York: Harper
and Row.

Brown, Roger, and Albert Gilman.  1970. The Pronouns of Power and Solidarity. 
In Psycholinguistics, Roger Brown (ed), 302-335. New York: Free Press.

Burt, Susan Meredith. 2015.  “There’s not a lot of negotiation”: Address terms
in an academic department. In Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Im/politeness,
Marina Terkourafi (ed.), 71-90.  Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.

Clyne, Michael, Catrin Norrby, and Jane Warren. 2009. Language and Human
Relations: Styles of Address in Contemporary Usage. Cambridge: CUP.  

Norrby, Catrin, and Camilla Wide. 2015. Address Practice as Social Action:
European Perspectives. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Zwicky, Arnold. 1974. Hey, Whatsyourname!  In  Papers from the Tenth Regional
Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, Michael, La Galy, Robert A. Fox,
and Anthony Bruck (eds.), 787-801. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Susan Meredith Burt is Professor of Linguistics in the English Department at
Illinois State University, and a member of INAR, the International Network for
Address Research.





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