Cover not available
Part of
Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 10: Selected papers from 'Going Romance' 28, Lisbon
Edited by Ernestina Carrilho, Alexandra Fiéis, Maria Lobo and Sandra Pereira
[Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 10] 2016
► pp. 61–82

When imperfections are perfect

Prosody, phi-features and deixis in Central and Southern Italian vocatives

| Leiden University
| Leiden University and Meertens Instituut

Vocatives are often considered as exceptions to the regularity of language, and therefore often put “outside” of grammar, and pertaining instead to speech. In this paper, we wish to show that this conceptualization of vocatives is wrong: not only are they perfectly regular, but they give us important insights on the grammatical architecture of language. We will consider a case-study, namely central and southern Italian vocatives, which are obtained by truncation, to show that: 1. Deixis and reference are to be kept separate. 2. Speech-act related information is encoded in syntax, but on a different dimension than core argumental syntax. 3. This dimension is targeted by prosody. 4. There would be no other way that grammar could be built, given the inviolable constraint imposed by prosody because of the fact that it cannot apply without underlying phonological segmental material.

Keywords: addressee, deixis, Phi-features, prosody, reference, speaker, speech act, syntax-PF interface, vocatives
Published online: 8 December 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/rllt.10.04dal
References
Ackema, P., and A. Neeleman
2003 "Context-sensitive spell-out." Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 21 (4): 681–735. DOI logo.Google Scholar
2012 "Agreement Weakening at PF: A Reply to Benmamoun and Lorimor." Linguistic Inquiry 43 (1):75–96. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Alber, Birgit
2010 "An Exploration of Truncation in Italian." In Rutgers Working Papers in Linguistics, edited by D. Altshuler P. Staroverov, A. Braver, C.A. Fasola and S. Murray, 1–30. Rutgers: Rutgers Linguistics.Google Scholar
Alber, Birgit, and Sabine Arndt-Lappe
2012 "Templatic and subtractive truncation." In The Morphology and Phonology of Eponence, edited by Jochen Trommer, 289–325. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Anderson, John M
2007 The grammar of names, Oxford linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bianchi, Valentina
2003 "On finiteness as logophoric anchoring." In Temps et point de vue/Tense and point of view, edited by Jacqueline Guéron and Liliane Tasmowsky, 213–246. Paris: Nanterre.Google Scholar
2006 "On the syntax of personal arguments." Lingua 116 (12):2023–2067. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cabré, Teresa
1993 "Estructura gramatical i lexicó: El mot mínim en català." PhD, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.Google Scholar
Cabré, Teresa, and Maria del Mar Vanrell
2008 "Accent i entonació en els vocatius de l’alguerès." In La toponomàstica de les illes del Mediterrani occidental (XXXV Col·loqui de la Societat d’Onomàstica l’Alguer, maig del 2008), 331–341. València-l’Alguer: Editorial Denes.Google Scholar
Cheng, Lisa L-S, and Laura J Downing
2012 "Prosodic domains do not match spell-out domains." McGill Working Papers in Linguistics 22:1.Google Scholar
Chomsky, Noam
2000 "Minimalist Inquiries: The Framework." In Step by step: Essays on minimalist syntax in honor of Howard Lasnik, edited by Roger Martin, David Michaels and Juan Uriagereka, 89–155. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
2001 "Derivation by Phase." In Ken Hale: a Life in Language, edited by Michael Kenstowicz, 1–52. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
2008 "On phases." In Foundational Issues in Linguistic Theory. Essays in honour of Jean-Roger Vergnaud, edited by Robert Freidin, Carlos Otero and Maria Luisa Zubizarreta, 133–66. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cinque, Guglielmo
1988 "On si constructions and the theory of arb." Linguistic Inquiry 19 (4):521–581.Google Scholar
Cohn, Abigail
2004 "Truncation in Indonesian: Evidence for violable minimal words and ANCHORRIGHT." In Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth Annual Meeting of the North-East Linguistics Society , 175–189.
D'Alessandro, Roberta
2002 "Agreement in Italian impersonal si constructions: a derivational analysis." Revista da ABRALIN 1 (1):35–72.Google Scholar
2004a "Impersonal si constructions. Agreement and intepretation." PhD, University of Stuttgart.Google Scholar
2004b "Impersonal si constructions. How semantics determines agreement." PROCEEDINGS-NELS.Google Scholar
2007 Impersonal si constructions : agreement and interpretation, Studies in generative grammar. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2008 "Syntaktische und pragmatische Merkmale: Eine Fallstudie." In Romanistische Syntax – minimalistisch., edited by Guido Mensching and Eva-Maria Remberger. Tübingen: Gunther Narr Verlag.Google Scholar
2013 "Person-oriented phenomena." Workshop on Personal Pronoun, Utrecht University.Google Scholar
D'Alessandro, Roberta, and Tobias Scheer
2015 "Modular PIC." Linguistic Inquiry 46 (4).Google Scholar
Espinal, M. Teresa
2013 "On the structure of vocatives." In Vocative!, edited by Barbara Sonnenhauser and Patrizia Noel Aziz Hanna, 109–132. Berlin: De Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Göksel, Asli, and Markus Alexander Pöchtrager
2013 "The vocative and its kin: marking function through prosody." In Vocative! Addressing between Syetem and Performance, edited by Barbara Sonnenhauser and Patrizia Noel Aziz Hanna, 87–108. Berlin: De Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hermans, Ben J.H
1994 "The Composite Nature of Accent: with case studies of the Limburgian and Serbo-Croatian pitch accent." PhD, Free University of Amsterdam.Google Scholar
Jensen, J.T
1977 Yapese Reference Grammar. Honolulu: The University Press of Hawai'i.Google Scholar
Kuen, H
1932 "El dialecto de Alguer y su posición en la historia de la lengua catalana." In Anuari de l’Oficina Romànica de Lingüística i Literatura, 121–177.Google Scholar
Levinson, Stephen C
1983 Pragmatics, Cambridge textbooks in linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
McCarthy, John J, and Alan Prince
1986 Prosodic morphology. Ms., University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and Brandeis University, Waltham, Mass.Google Scholar
Moro, Andrea
2003 "Notes on vocative case. A case study in clause structure." In Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2001:, edited by Josep Quer, Jan Schroten, Mauro Scorretti, Petra Sleeman and Els Verheugd, 247–261. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Nespor, Marina, and Irene Vogel
1986 Prosodic phonology. Dordrecht: Foris.Google Scholar
Poletto, Cecilia
2000 The higher functional field: Evidence from northern Italian dialects. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Portner, Paul
2007 "Imperatives and modals." Natural Language Semantics 15:351–383. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schaden, Gerhard
2010 "Vocatives. A note on addressee-management." In University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics, 176–185.Google Scholar
Sigurðsson, Halldór Ármann
2000 "The locus of case and agreement." Working papers in Scandinavian syntax 65:65–108.Google Scholar
2004a "Agree and agreement: Evidence from Germanic." In Argument Structure, edited by Werner Abraham, 61–103. Berlin: Akademieverlag.Google Scholar
2004b "Icelandic non-nominative subjects." In Non-nominative subjects, edited by Peri Bhaskararao and Karamuri Venkata Subbarao, 137–160. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sonnenhauser, Barbara, and Patrizia Noel Aziz Hanna
2013 Vocative! : addressing between system and performance, Trends in linguistics Studies and monographs. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Speas, Margaret
2000 "Person and point of view in Navajo verbs." MIT Working Papers on Endangered Languages and Less Familiar Languages’ 1:19–38.Google Scholar
2004 "Evidentiality, logophoricity and the syntactic representation of pragmatic features." Lingua 114 (3):255–276. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Thornton, Anna M
1996 "On some phenomena of prosodic morphology in Italian: accorciamenti, hypocoristics and prosodic delimitation." Probus 8 (1):81–112. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Van Oostendorp, Marc
2006 "Expressing Inflection Tonally." Catalan Journal of Linguistics 4 (1):107–126.Google Scholar
Vanrell, Maria del Mar, and Teresa Cabré
2011 "Troncamento e intonazione dei vocativi in Italia centromeridionale." In Contesto comunicativo e variabilità nella produzione e percezione della lingua, Atti el 7 convegno AISV (26-28 January 2011, Lecce), edited by A. Stella Gili-Fivela, L. Garrapa andi M. Grimaldi. Rome: Bulzoni.Google Scholar
Woodbury, Anthony C
1985 "Marginal Agents." In Papers from the Parasession on Causatives and Agentivity . Chicago: CLS.
Zanuttini, Raffaella
2008 "Encoding the addressee in the syntax." Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 26:185–218. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Zwicky, Arnold
1974 "Hey, whatsyourname!" In Papers from the 10th Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, edited by Michael La Galy, Robert Fox and Arnold Bruck, 787–801.Google Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 21 other publications

Alber, Birgit & Sabine Arndt-Lappe
2023. Anchoring in truncation: A typological analysis. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 41:1 ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Corr, Alice
2022. The Grammar of the Utterance, DOI logo
Corr, Alice
2022. The grammar of dialogue. In The Grammar of the Utterance, ► pp. 251 ff. DOI logo
Corr, Alice
2022. Utterances without commitment. In The Grammar of the Utterance, ► pp. 203 ff. DOI logo
Corr, Alice
2022. A grammar for the utterance. In The Grammar of the Utterance, ► pp. 15 ff. DOI logo
Corr, Alice
2022. The expression of affect. In The Grammar of the Utterance, ► pp. 157 ff. DOI logo
Corr, Alice
2022. Introduction. In The Grammar of the Utterance, ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Corr, Alice
2022. Conclusions. In The Grammar of the Utterance, ► pp. 299 ff. DOI logo
Corr, Alice
2022. Interjections and particles. In The Grammar of the Utterance, ► pp. 99 ff. DOI logo
Corr, Alice
2022. Vocatives. In The Grammar of the Utterance, ► pp. 51 ff. DOI logo
Corr, Alice
2022. Doing things with utterance grammar. In The Grammar of the Utterance, ► pp. 135 ff. DOI logo
Cruschina, Silvio & Valentina Bianchi
2022. The Syntactic Encoding of Conventional Implicatures in Sicilian Polar Questions. Probus 34:1 ► pp. 77 ff. DOI logo
Floricic, Franck & Lucia Molinu
2018. Chapter 18. Are Sardinian vocatives perfectly regular?. In Structuring Variation in Romance Linguistics and Beyond [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 252], ► pp. 271 ff. DOI logo
González López, Laura
2022. Lingüista, acuérdate del vocativo. Los vocativos y su proyección funcional. Verba: Anuario Galego de Filoloxía ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Loporcaro, Michele & Vincenzo Faraoni
2021. Il costrutto allocutivoa Nando!in romanesco: fonologia, morfologia, sintassi, semantica, pragmatica. Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 137:2 ► pp. 561 ff. DOI logo
López, Laura González & Andreas Trotzke
2021. ¡Mira!The grammar-attention interface in the Spanish left periphery. The Linguistic Review 38:1 ► pp. 5 ff. DOI logo
Manzini, Maria Rita
2018. Chapter 1. Introduction: Structuring thought, externalizing structure. In Structuring Variation in Romance Linguistics and Beyond [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 252], ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Massaro, Angelapia
2022. Romance Genitives: Agreement, Definiteness, and Phases*. Transactions of the Philological Society 120:1 ► pp. 85 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2022. List of Abbreviations. In The Grammar of the Utterance, ► pp. xi ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2022. General Preface. In The Grammar of the Utterance, ► pp. vii ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2022. Copyright Page. In The Grammar of the Utterance, ► pp. iv ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 14 may 2023. 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.