Per una teoria del vocativo. Persona, sistema e asimmetria

The vocative case has been the object of many remarks since the Ancient Stoà until nowadays: as a matter of fact, its specifi city within case systems is a topic of theoretical discussion which often appears in Western metalinguistic thinking. Nevertheless, scientifi c linguistic literature lacks deep analysis in this regard, mainly as far as theoretical aspects are concerned. This paper addresses the issue of outlining a theory of the vocative. The vocative has a special status with respect to the category of case: it is an extrasyntactic element and it does not mark, as other case values do, the semantic-syntactic relation between noun phrases and other elements in the clause, but rather its function is pragmatic, namely placing an addressee in a given speech context. In this paper we put forward the hypothesis that the vocative can be defi ned as a “referentiality shifter”, namely a morphological tool linking the inherently non-deictic referentiality of nouns to the extra-linguistic context. Furthermore, the vocative marks only the second person in opposition to fi rst and third person: in this sense, it can be said to establish an asymmetry within the noun system, since fi rst and third person are not marked for person. In this regard, we argue that the anomaly of the vocative within case systems of Greek and Latin (as well as of other languages owning this category) can be interpreted and solved by means of the Benvenistean concepts of person vs non-person and, moreover, that it supports Benveniste’s remarks about personal pronouns. In fact, the vocative case gives prominence to the fact that a split, different from Benveniste’s corrélation de personnalité, can be outlined within nouns: second person vs fi rst and third person. This split illustrates the specifi c feature of language of marking the functionally outstanding members of a given category occurring in a given domain, in this case the second person within the domain of noun referentiality.