This study investigates the functions, meanings, and varieties of forms of address in Shakespeare s dramatic work. New categories of Shakespearean vocatives are developed and the grammar of vocatives is investigated in, above, and below the clause, following morpho-syntactic, semantic, lexicographical, pragmatic, social and contextual criteria. Going beyond the conventional paradigm of power and solidarity and with recourse to Shakespearean drama as both text and performance, the study sees vocatives as foregrounded experiential, interpersonal and textual markers. Shakespeare s vocatives construe, both quantitatively and qualitatively, habitus and identity. They illustrate relationships or messages. They reflect Early Modern, Shakespearean, and intra- or inter-textual contexts. Theoretically and methodologically, the study is interdisciplinary. It draws on approaches from (historical) pragmatics, stylistics, Hallidayean grammar, corpus linguistics, cognitive linguistics, socio-historical linguistics, sociology, and theatre semiotics. This study contributes, thus, not only to Shakespeare studies, but also to literary linguistics and literary criticism.

Vocatives have rarely been comprehensively discussed in their various facets. With 12 contributions covering the diversity of vocative marking, structures, and functions, as well as the relevance of vocatives for theoretical and methodological reasoning, this volume contributes to closing a significant gap in linguistic research. It provides a detailed picture of the vocative as a structure between 'system' and 'performance'.

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"

This study investigates the functions, meanings, and varieties of forms of address in Shakespeare’s dramatic work. New categories of Shakespearean vocatives are developed and the grammar of vocatives is investigated in, above, and below the clause, following morpho-syntactic, semantic, lexicographical, pragmatic, social and contextual criteria. Going beyond the conventional paradigm of power and solidarity and with recourse to Shakespearean drama as both text and performance, the study sees vocatives as foregrounded experiential, interpersonal and textual markers. Shakespeare’s vocatives construe, both quantitatively and qualitatively, habitus and identity. They illustrate relationships or messages. They reflect Early Modern, Shakespearean, and intra- or inter-textual contexts. Theoretically and methodologically, the study is interdisciplinary. It draws on approaches from (historical) pragmatics, stylistics, Hallidayean grammar, corpus linguistics, cognitive linguistics, socio-historical linguistics, sociology, and theatre semiotics. This study contributes, thus, not only to Shakespeare studies, but also to literary linguistics and literary criticism.

The volumes "Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory" published in the series "Current Issues in Linguistic Theory "contain the selected papers of the "Going Romance" conferences, a major European annual discussion forum for theoretically relevant research on Romance languages."Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2001" is the third such volume. It presents a selection of the papers that have been presented at the occasion of "Going Romance 2001 (XV)" which was held at the University of Amsterdam on December 6-8, 2001. The three-day program included a workshop on Determiners. The volume contains articles on specifics of one or more Romance languages or varieties: the architecture of the Determiner Phrase and properties of determiners, the left periphery of the sentence and clause structure, null elements and their interpretation, clitics, and other interesting phenomena in the Romance languages.