An overview of vocatives in European Portuguese

This paper aims to provide a short presentation of the vocative phrase in European Portuguese, to which very little attention has been paid in the literature. The main contribution of this paper is the argument that certain pragmatic markers involved in direct addresses should be considered for their syntactic function within the vocative phrase, rather than being treated as independent interjections. In this respect, the data allow me to draw the reader’s attention to the grammaticalization process that produces such pragmatic markers. The presentation of the vocative phrase in European Portuguese is organized according to the way it encodes the pragmatic features of the direct address in this language. As the encoding of the direct address is cross-linguistically diverse, this presentation will allow linguists who work on vocatives in other languages to exploit my European Portuguese data for comparative studies in pragmatics or in morpho-syntax