Vocatives and Other Direct Address Forms: A Contrastive Study

In this paper I analyze Russian direct address forms, both the distinct truncated vocative and nominative-case direct address forms. I contrast the formal and functional restrictions on the truncated vocative with vocatives in other languages (e.g. Czech and Polish), and I compare the interpolation of Russian direct address forms in an utterance to the situation in English. While similarities are found both in the form and the usage of Russian direct address forms with those in other languages, the prosodic and syntactic constraints in English are considerably stronger than in Russian, which means that the punctuating function of direct address forms is considerably more flexible in Russian than in English