SCIENTIFIC SERIES
“COGNITIVE STUDIES OF LANGUAGE”
Author: T.Е. Yanko
Affiliation: Russian Academy of Sciences
Abstract:
Denoting the Addressee in vocatives depends on specific communicative functions displayed in a variety of vocative illocutionary forces. These functions are appealing, identifying, specifying, expressing feelings and attitudes, and being polite. These communicative functions underlie a variety of vocative illocutionary acts such as initiating contact, keeping contact, applying to the Addressee in announcements, prayers, proverbs, and poetry. The analysis shows that 1) the vocative illocutionary force is non-homogeneous, it appears in a variety of communicative types; 2) lexical units denoting the Addressee in various functions have different vocative potential, i.e. they can be employed in some functions and cannot be employed in the other ones; 3) various communicative functions and compositions of functions (up to the absence of any vocative function in pseudo-vocatives) are displayed in specific types of vocative denotation. For instance, personal names (Vas’a) are used both in initiating and keeping contact because they can identify the Addressee, while the nouns of attitudes (predatel’ ‘betrayer’) are only used in keeping contact because they are “bad” identifiers and therefore they are unable to initiate communication. Similarly, names of stable taxonomic classes (francuz ‘Frenchman’, khirurg ‘surgeon’, astmatic ‘bronchial asthma sufferer’) are used neither in calls nor in keeping contact because they can neither identify, nor express attitudes. Selecting a lexeme to denote the Addressee is therefore entirely dependent on the set of communicative parameters.
Keywords: vocative, illocutionary force, communication, denotation, lexical units, figure and ground