Nicholas Davis

A vocative is when one of the interlocutors are referred to in a sentence. This phenomena does not contribute directly to the meaning of the sentece, but rather changes the mode, style, or emphasis of asentence. In the examples I have surveyed, it can serve as a emphasis of anger, pleading, commanding. In general, it seems that speech act utterances can have a vocative rather easily. This connection with speech acts is examined later in connection to an enunciation mode.

The following tree was originally proposed to deal with a sentence from LRRH. It features a kind of meta-stemmatic, a tree elaborating information like: I acknowledge that it is you who my words are directed at.

Example 1)

Saying someone's name, to either guide their attention, give an order, or just add emphasis, leads to a vocative. The next example utilizes the original vocative suggestion. The only problem I am having with this scenario is that 'Sara' appears in the meta-stemma, but does this mean that it does not have to appear in the object stemma? That is, exist in the normal stemmatic representation. The explicit stemma goes to the object of what 'I say to you', thus in the enunciation tree, the content of the 3 is the spoken sentence.

Per Aage suggested that the enunciation tree is always there existing as a backdrop of a conversation; an implicit agreement between the interlocutors that, 'yes I am talking to you, in specific' However, it is only in some situations that the vocative is used. It seems to be useful while asking someone to perform some act. So, speech acts have  a certain place in the investigation of vocatives. Saying please came up during this exploration, and the initial analysis lead to me placing 'please' as a quantifier off of 'not' It is like an emphsis of how much someone should not do something.  Example three displays the initial 'please' analysis.

But it is really a kind of speech act marker, marking a stylistic difference in communication. It seems that altering the enunciation tree may reveal what is going on in this vocative. Instead of just ' I say to you, Mister' it would be ' I plead to you, mister' it is a manner of saying. The next example shows an idea of how to use the enunciation tree to classify what mode of speech someone is in. The head could even display a speech act domain. Thinking about the enunciation tree with respect to the parser leads me to the problem of source tracking. If parsing stemma had an enunciation tree implemented, it could try to keep track of information that way, by storing "I, Nick, say to you, listener" This way, each stemma  would be tagged with who said it to whom.

*As a side note, 'me' is also problematic. I have conflicting intuitions for what 'me' is doing. At first, I thought it was 'to me' because the act of interrupting is being done to me. However, interrupt could have the object of me, because it was me that was interrupted. Like, interrupt what? interrupt me. Here I kept me as a four, but this decision fluctuates between these examples.

     Depending on the approach, the linearization of the phenomena seems like it will provide a problem. It seems to make sense to have the persons name as a quantifier off of an implicit or explicit subject of you, but this is in the normal stemma, not the enunciation tree. This example displays 'tony' as a 7 off of the subject. It also deals with 'I'm telling you' as an enunciation tree in itselft, but the verb is am, which is different than the other examples. I just used telling as a predicate of am, with a dative of 'you' becuase its "i'm telling to you.'

But the enunciation verse stemma tree gets blurred sometimes.  This problem has plagued the analysis, what is the connection between the enunciation and normal stemma, how can the two interact/ exchange informaiton? Using stemmatic logic, it would make sense for the 2 and 1 branch of the enunciation tree to be acted on by the subject 3 because of the concentric or funnel like quality that the nodes display. However, this means that the subject, the normal stemma, is not aware of what is going on in the four branch of the enunciation tree, namely the vocative. How can this "to you, tony" be transported to the normal stemma? This is still an issue. However, I think it is an important discovery that we may be able to 1) track sources with enunciation tree and 2) use the mode or speech act category as a head in the enunciation tree, like the [plead] example.