Il vocativo nelle lingue slave: un quadro articolato

The article presents a survey of the state of conservation of the vocative case and its morphological markers in standard Slavic languages. It gives an account of the simplifications that have occurred at the paradigmatic level and outlines the principles underlying the replacement of the vocative with the nominative – or basic form – in the languages where both cases are found as alternative or concurrent strategies. In this context, the article shows a type specialization of vocative forms to express the speaker’s personal relation to the receiver and, at the same time, an increasingly frequent usage of the nominative/basic form as an actual form of call/appeal. Finally, by listing the different groups of Slavic languages in an order according to their degree of formal and functional maintenance of the vocative, a model for a degrammaticalization process is proposed, valid for all Slavic languages: conservation > alteration > contraction > elimination.