Chapter published in:
Perspectives on Language Structure and Language Change: Studies in honor of Henning Andersen
Edited by Lars Heltoft, Iván Igartua, Brian D. Joseph, Kirsten Jeppesen Kragh and Lene Schøsler
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 345] 2019
► pp. 381–394

Name-calling

The Russian ‘new Vocative’ and its status

Henning Andersen (2012) points out that the Russian “new Vocative” (e.g., мам! ‘mama!’, Саш! ‘Sasha!’) presents a series of unusual behaviors that set it apart from ordinary case marking. Andersen argues that the Vocative should not be considered a declensional word form of nouns. The Russian Vocative is certainly an uncommon linguistic category, but does this entail setting up a new transcategorial derivation? Similar restrictions are found in other markers that are generally recognized as case desinences. The pragmatic use of virile vs. deprecatory nominative plural markers in Polish and lexical and morphophonological restrictions on the “second Locative” in Russian. The restrictions found in the Vocative are certainly unusual, but no single one of them can be said to exclude a marker from being identified with a case, and one must ask what we gain by inaugurating new derivational types.
Keywords: Vocative, transcategorial derivation, speech acts; Russian, Polish, North Saami
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction: What is a Vocative?
  • 2.The Russian “new Vocative” and its peculiarities
    • 2.1Pragmatic peculiarities
    • 2.2Lexical peculiarities
    • 2.3Syntactic peculiarities
    • 2.4Morphophonological peculiarities
    • 2.5Phonological peculiarities
  • 3.Similar peculiarities elsewhere in Russian and Slavic
    • 3.1Pragmatic peculiarities
    • 3.2Lexical peculiarities
    • 3.3Syntactic outliers
    • 3.4Morphophonological outliers
    • 3.5Phonological outliers
  • 4.The emergence of a “new Vocative” in North Saami
  • 5.Conclusions
  • References
Published online: 18 June 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.345.18jan
References
Abuladze, Lia & Andreas Ludden
2013 The vocative in Georgian. In Barbara Sonnenhauser & Patrizia Noel Haziz Hanna (eds.), Vocative! Addressing between system and performance (= Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs 261), 25–42. Berlin: De Gruyter. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Andersen, Henning
2012 The new Russian vocative: Synchrony, diachrony, typology. Scando-Slavica 51. 122–167. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Bentz, Christian & Bodo Winter
2013 Languages with more second language learners tend to lose nominal case. Language Dynamics and Change 3. 1–27.Google Scholar
Bethin, Christina Y.
2012 On Paradigm Uniformity and Contrast in Russian Vowel Reduction. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 30.2. 425–463. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Dahl, Östen
2004 The Growth and Maintenance of Linguistic Complexity. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Danièl’, Mikhail A.
2009 “Novyj” russkij vokativ: istorija formy usečennogo obraščenija skvoz’ prizmu korpusa pis’mennyx tekstov. In K. L. Kiseleva, V. A. Plungjan, E. V. Raxilina & S. G. Tatevosov (eds.), Korpusnye issledovanija po russkoj grammatike, 224–244. Moscow: Probel 2000.Google Scholar
Daniel, Michael and Andrew Spencer
2009 The vocative – an outlier case. In Andrej Malchukov & Andrew Spencer (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Case, 626–634. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Endresen, Anna, Laura A. Janda, Robert Reynolds & Francis M. Tyers
2016 Who needs particles? A challenge to the classification of particles as a part of speech in Russian. Russian Linguistics 40(2). 1–30. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Faulhaber, Susen, Thomas Herbst & Peter Uhrig
2013 Funktionswortklassen im Englischen: linguistische und lexikografische Perspektiven. In Eva Breindl & Annette Klosa (eds.), Funktionswörter|buch|forschung: Zur lexikographischen Darstellung von Partikeln, Konnektoren, Präpositionen und anderen Funktionswörtern. Germanistische Linguistik 221–222, 59–110. Hildesheim: Georg Olms.Google Scholar
Fink, Robert O.
1972 Person in nouns: Is the vocative a case? The American Journal of Philology 93. 61–68. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Floricic, Franck
2011 Le vocative et la périphérie du système des cas: entre archaïsmes et innovations. Mémoires de la Société de Linguistique de Paris, Nouvelle Série Tome XIX: L’évolution grammaticale à travers les langues romanes. 103–134.Google Scholar
Friedman, Victor A.
1993 Macedonian. In Bernard Comrie & Greville G. Corbett (eds.), The Slavonic Languages, 249–305. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Girvin, Cammeron
2013 Addressing changes in the Bulgarian vocative. In Barbara Sonnenhauser & Patrizia Noel Haziz Hanna (eds.), Vocative! Addressing between system and performance (= Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs 261), 157–188. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Greenberg, Robert D.
1996 The Balkan Slavic Appellative. Munich: Lincom.Google Scholar
Herbst, Thomas & Susen Schüller
2008 Introduction to Syntactic Analysis – A Valency Approach. Tübingen: Narr.Google Scholar
Hill, Virginia
2014 Vocatives. How Syntax Meets with Pragmatics (= Empirical Approaches to Linguistics Theory 5). Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar
Holden, Kyril T.
1978 Initial and final consonant clusters in Russian and English. Russian Language Journal 32 (112), 19–42.Google Scholar
Isačenko, Alexander
1962 Die russische Sprache der Gegenwart. Formenlehre. Munich: Hueber.Google Scholar
Jakobson, Roman O.
1971 Zur Struktur des russischen Verbums. In Roman Jakobson, Selected Writings. Vol. II, 3–15. The Hague: Mouton.Google Scholar
Janda, Laura A.
1993 A Geography of Case Semantics: The Czech Dative and the Russian Instrumental (= Cognitive Linguistics Research, v. 4). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
1996 Back from the brink: A study of how relic forms in languages serve as source material for analogical extension. Munich: Lincom.Google Scholar
Janda, Laura A. & Steven J. Clancy
2006 The Case Book for Czech. Bloomington, IN: Slavica.Google Scholar
Janda, Laura A. & Lene Antonsen
2016 The ongoing eclipse of possessive suffixes in North Saami: A case study in reduction of morphological complexity. Diachronica 33(3), 330–366. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Julien, Marit
2014 Vokativar i norsk. Norsk Lingvistisk Tidsskrift 32. 130–165.Google Scholar
Kiparsky, Valentin
1967 Russische historische Grammatik. Vol. 2. Die Entwicklung des Formensystems. Heidelberg: Winter.Google Scholar
Lass, Roger
1990 How to do things with junk: Exaptation in language evolution. Linguistics 26. 79–102. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Manning, C. D.
2011 Part-of-Speech Tagging from 97% to 100%: Is It Time for Some Linguistics? In Alexander Gelbukh (ed.), Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing, 12th International Conference, CICLing 2011, Proceedings, Part I. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 6608, 171–189.Google Scholar
McWhorter, John H.
2007 Language interrupted. Signs of non-native acquisition in standard language grammars. Oxford. Oxford University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2011 Linguistic simplicity and complexity: Why do languages undress? Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Plungjan, Vladimir A.
2002 K semantike russkogo lokativa (“vtorogo predložnogo padeža”). Semiotika i informatika 37. 229–254.Google Scholar
Sonnenhauser, Barbara & Patrizia Noel Aziz Hanna
2013 Introduction: Vocative! In: Barbara Sonnenhauser & Patrizia Noel Haziz Hanna (eds.), Vocative! Addressing between system and performance (= Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs 261), 1–23. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Worth, Dean
1983 Conditions on –á plural formation in Russian. Wiener slawistischer Almanak 11. 257–262.Google Scholar
1984 Russian GEN2, LOC2 Revisited. In Joost van Baak (ed.), Signs of Friendship. Amsterdam: Rodopi.Google Scholar
Ylikoski, Jussi
. 2014. Davvisámegiela -ráigge – substantiiva, advearba, postposišuvdna vai kásus? Sámi dieđalaš áigecála 2014(2). Google Scholar
Zwicky, Arnold
1974 Hey, Whatsyourname. In Michael La Galy, Robert A. Fox & Anthony Bruck (eds.), Papers from the Tenth Regional Meeting, Chicago Linguistic Society. April 19-21, 1974, 787–801. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.Google Scholar
Zwicky, Arnold M.
1985 Clitics and particles. Language 61(2). 283–305. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 2 other publications

Floricic, Franck & Lucia Molinu
2018.  In Structuring Variation in Romance Linguistics and Beyond [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 252], ► pp. 271 ff. Crossref logo
Nábělková, Mira
2019. “Here’s to you, dear Janko, on your birthday...” On the ways of addressing people in Slovak (and something over and above that). Journal of Linguistics/Jazykovedný casopis 70:3 ► pp. 627 ff. Crossref logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 01 april 2022. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.