Vocatives : how syntax meets with pragmatics / / by Virginia Hill ; with the contribution of Melita Stavrou

• Record Nr.: UNINA9910790827303321
• Autore: Hill Virginia
• Pubbl/distr/stampa: Leiden : , : Brill, , 2014
• ISBN: 90-04-26138-9
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (258 pages) : illustrations
• Collana: Empirical approaches to linguistic theory, , 2210-6243 ; ; volume 5
• Altri autori (Persone): StavrouMelita
• Disciplina: 415/.5
• Soggetti: Grammar, Comparative and general - Noun; Grammar, Comparative and general - Syntax; Pragmatics; Forms of address
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Note generali: Description based upon print version of record.
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references and index.
• Nota di contenuto: A formal twist for the same old story -- Back to the (theoretical) drawing board : was Ross right after all? -- The core of the matter : identifying and interacting with the addressee -- The system behind the noise -- The Speech Act connection : particles of direct address -- The vocative and the clause -- Ramifications--the imperative.
• Sommario/riassunto: Vocatives proposes a formal syntactic approach to vocatives. The analysis focuses on the internal structure of vocatives phrases and on the mechanism through which a vocative phrase connects with the clause. Vocatives are nouns that encode conversational pragmatic features at their left periphery. Any vocative phrase with this structure becomes the indirect object of a Speech Act head mapped at the left periphery of clauses. This analysis has implications for the debate on whether pragmatic features are mapped into syntax, and, subsequently, on how a grammar of direct address may look like. Since particles of direct address, imperatives and exclamations fall under the same umbrella of speech acts, they all need re-assessment from the same perspective. \'This book is a tour de force: Virginia Hill brings the vocative a category which had so far remained marginal and ill understood into main stream syntactic research by tying it in with recent progress in the study of the syntactization of pragmatic ; functions. What used to be a fringe phenomenon will now be part of the core theory.\' Liliane Haegeman, Ghent University \'Virginia Hill has redrawn the syntax-pragmatics interface by nudging syntax into domains that are traditionally considered to be purely pragmatic in nature. She has done this with sophisticated analysis and a breathtaking array of cross-linguistic data.\' Shigery Miyagawa, Massachusetts Institute of Technology “Vocatives are a fundamental yet strangely neglected aspect of the grammar of many languages. General readers intrigued and perhaps puzzled by the nature of vocatives and how they are expressed cross-linguistically will find this a very helpful and enlightening book.\' Martin Maiden, University of Oxford \'