Guest speaker: Martina Wiltschko (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)

We are delighted to welcome Martina Wiltschko, a renowned syntactician and pragmaticist currently based at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona as a Research Professor with the ICREA group (the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies). She is also an Honorary Affiliate Professor at the University of British Columbia. Her talk, "The grammar of interactional language: The view from vocativeness," will be taking place from 3:00 PM to 4:30 PM on Friday, February 5, with a digital reception for after that. The Zoom link for the talk can be found in the email. (Note the updated title and abstract.)

In this paper we introduce and motivate the nominal interactional structure, i.e., a dedicated layer of structure dominating the classic functional architecture associated with nominals (DP). We show that this structure allows for a novel analysis of vocatives in a non-construction-specific way. That is, existing analyses postulate a dedicated Voc(ative)P to account for the special properties of vocatives whereas nominal interactional structure not only hosts vocatives, but also formal pronouns, and other nominals that bear socio-linguistic content (R&W). We further show that the nominal interactional structure we assume allows for an elegant analysis of two types of vocatives which have long been established in the literature, namely calls and addresses (Zwicky 1974, Slocum 2016). Our analysis is the first to give a structural account that distinguishes between these two types of vocatives. Our independently motivated model of the interactional structure provides the structural and functional distinction to characterize the two types of vocatives. We also show how vocatives are integrated into the larger clause-structure, which like nominals is also dominated by an interactional layer. We show that it is in this layer that interactional arguments like vocatives are licensed. Inasmuch as our analysis is on the right track, it provides novel evidence that syntactic structure interfaces with pragmatic knowledge just as it does with conceptual/intentional knowledge.