[Lingtyp] Extended uses of terms of address/vocatives

Sat Feb 8 13:55:09 UTC 2025

Dear Andrea and all,
I'm not sure if this is what Andrea is looking for because what I have in mind is not a vocative and not even a nominal, but I thought I’d take the risk.
In the Ruhr area dialect of western Germany (IE and lots of speakers, but not official and hardly ever written), the construction hör mal (listen.IMP for_once), roughly meaning “Listen up” has developed a more general pragmatic function of addressing a discourse participant or drawing her/his attention (comparable to English hey), along with phonological reduction: hömma. While the emergence of that function is not very surprising I assume, hömma has also taken on two additional senses, with marked differences in prosody between the two:

  1.  irritation (e.g., when you see your friend throw a piece of trash on the street)
  2.  appreciation/affection (e.g., when your friend has gotten you something precious for your birthday)

I guess both senses can be subsumed under Andrea’s label expressing the speaker’s surprise (with both positive and negative nuances).
All best,
Tom Koss (University of Antwerp)

________________________________
From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of Riccardo Giomi via Lingtyp <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Sent: Friday, February 7, 2025 6:15 PM
To: Andrea Sansò <asanso at gmail.com>; Anna Margetts <anna.margetts at monash.edu>
Cc: LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG <LINGTYP at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] Extended uses of terms of address/vocatives

CAUTION: This email originated from outside of the organization. Do not click links or open attachments unless you recognize the sender and know the content is safe.

Dear Andrea and all,

Nothing from my side about non-LOL languages (sorry!) but I can mention two IE languages where one of these older vocatives went a long way in acquiring new uses (which most people would call discourse-marker uses, I guess).

1) Portuguese pá (allegedly from rapaz, 'boy', so same etymon as raga but in the singular): this is extremely frequent in spoken European Portuguese (and I believe also in several states of Brazil). To simplify you can call it an emphasis marker, but its use is so ubiquitous that more fine-grained classification is probably in order. Can't cite any literature, but there will certainly be something around.

2) Greek re, allegedly from the vocative of an adjective móros ('dull, dumb'; might be related to English moron). This has cognates across the Balkan Sprachbund (and beyond, apparently also in Turkish) and as far as Greek goes, I know it is used both for mirativity and to signal some kind of intimacy/camaraderie (which I think amounts to a case of so-called "pragmatic reversal", given the lexical origin; interestingly, this use often accompanies an actual vocative). See

Joseph, B. D. (1997). Methodological Issues in the History of the Balkan Lexicon: The Case of Greek vré / ré and Relatives*. Balkanica 10, 255–277

Holton, D., Mackridge, P., Philippaki-Warburton, I., & Spyropoulos, V. (1997). Greek: A comprehensive grammar of the modern language. London: Routledge.

Best wishes,
Riccardo

Riccardo Giomi
Assistant Professor of Functional Linguistics
University of Amsterdam
Faculty of Humanities: Department of Linguistics
Spuistraat 134, 1012 VB, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
________________________________
From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of Anna Margetts via Lingtyp <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Sent: 06 February 2025 16:19
To: Andrea Sansò <asanso at gmail.com>
Cc: LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG <LINGTYP at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] Extended uses of terms of address/vocatives

Hello Andrea,

A related phenomenon is found in the extended uses of first and second person pronouns for drawing attention to important information in discourse (e.g. in Kɔnni, Dogrib, Homeric Greek, Goemai) and in ‘narrative imperatives’ (e.g. in Arabic, North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic, Slavic and Balkan languages). In the attached paper I describe this for Saliba-Logea, an Oceanic language of Papua New Guinea, and also provide references for the languages mentioned above.

Regards,

Anna

Margetts, Anna. 2015. Person shift at narrative peak. Language, Volume 91, Number 4, pp. 755-805

Abstract

Narrators like to highlight important events in their story. In some languages, they may shift to first or second person pronouns to refer to third person referents in order to do so. Such pronoun shifts show functional parallels with tense shifts like the historical present, as both highlight events through shifts in deictic categories. Longacre (1983: 138-39) discusses the parallels between person and tense shifts in his account of narrative peak, i.e. the formal marking of important narrative events. Labov (1972) analyses similar strategies as internal evaluations. Person shifts constitute a phenomenon of the discourse-syntax interface and present a clear case of discourse structure influencing grammar. Both person shifts themselves and their motivation in narrative structure have been little investigated. The paper reviews person shifts in a number of languages reported in the literature and analyses in detail the characteristics of this discourse strategy in Saliba-Logea, an Oceanic language of Papua New Guinea. The study contributes to the growing body of research on pronouns and person markers, and of referring expressions more generally, by adding a new angle of investigation. Previous studies tend to focus on the morpho-syntactic choices of referring expressions and their motivations, i.e. on the choices between lexical nouns, free vs. bound pronouns, and so forth. The present study focuses on the paradigmatic choices between different person forms within one and the same morpho-syntactic expression type. In doing so it offers a new perspective on pronoun choice and the factors influencing it cross-linguistically. While some types of person shift appear to be rare, overall, the strategy of person shift at narrative peak seems to constitute a solid cross-linguistic phenomenon.

On Wed, 5 Feb 2025 at 06:00, Andrea Sansò via Lingtyp <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto:lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>> wrote:
Dear all,

My colleague and I are investigating an Italian term of address/vocative that appears to have recently developed new functions. The term in question, raga, is a shortened form of ragazzi/e (meaning "boys/girls" in the plural). While our analysis and interpretation of the data are still preliminary, we have observed that raga is no longer used exclusively in its original function as an attention-getter when addressing multiple interlocutors. Instead, it has acquired various functions in spoken language. Below is a preliminary list of these new functions:

- Expressing the speaker’s surprise (with both positive and negative nuances)
- Intensification/boosting
- Marking reported discourse

These new functions represent significant departures from the term's original, diachronically primary use. For instance, in some cases, raga is directed at a single hearer, contradicting its original plural reference. In others, the term occurs at the right periphery of an utterance, contrasting with its traditional use as a vocative or attention-getter, which is typically confined to the left periphery.

We are aware of several studies addressing the pragmatic evolution of terms of address in European languages. For example, in a contrastive study on güey in Mexican Spanish and alter in German, Kleinknecht and Sousa (2017: 257) argue that “terms of address have the potential to intensify the affectivity displayed by the speaker. In this capacity, they may be employed as linguistic strategies to enhance the expressive and illocutionary force of utterances.” Furthermore, these expressive uses can serve as the basis for more specific functions related to turn-taking and information management. In Mexican Spanish, for instance, güey can occur in the right periphery to emphasize the preceding segment, as illustrated in the following example (from Kleinknecht & Sousa 2017: 275):

[image.png]

While some of the functions we have identified for raga align with common uses of terms of address (e.g., intensification/boosting), others are perhaps less conventional. To situate our research within a typological framework, we would like to ask list members for examples of non-canonical uses of terms of address, particularly from non-European and non-LOL languages. We would especially appreciate examples involving terms with inherently plural reference, such as raga, as well as any references to relevant literature.

I will be happy to post a summary of the responses if needed. Thank you in advance for your help and insights.

Best regards,
Andrea Sansò
_______________________________________________
Lingtyp mailing list
Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto:Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
https://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20250208/92b50fd1/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: image.png
Type: image/png
Size: 28771 bytes
Desc: image.png
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20250208/92b50fd1/attachment.png>