Prosody and the Pragmatic Functions of Vocative in Spoken Italian Corpora

Abstract

Vocatives are bare nouns that address the interlocutor. They are out of the argument structure but are recently considered syntactically integrated into the utterance. Vocatives function to call on or strengthen social relationships. The prosody of recalls (Vocative chants) has been studied in the Autosegmental model. They can appear isolated by prosody when starting the utterance or more integrated when at its end. Assuming the Language into Act Theory and a corpus-based approach, the paper argues that Vocatives are Units of information and that their prosodic performance is predictive of their functions: a) isolated in a prosodic unit of a root type, they are speech acts (Distal/Proximal calls, Greetings, Regret, Protest) with differential prosody; b) focused in the first position of a Pattern of illocutionary units, serve at sharing the attention with the addressee; c) when out of focus, both in first and final position, are dialogical units of Allocutive strengthening the empathic relation and are not referential. Semantic correlations support their functional distinction.