The Vocative in Greek and Latin: Some Remarks About Serguey Sharypkin’s Article

Abstract

In “Eos” CI 2014 Serguey Sharypkin published an article dedicated to the status of the vocative, and actually of the noun forms in vocative, in Greek and Latin. In conclusion the Author states that the vocative is not a case but it is a form of calling and addressing someone, which in certain usages, i.e. with predicatives in the 2nd person or in the imperative, behaves as a case and may be described as a case. He substantiates his opinion by claiming that only in the aforementioned contexts the vocative form manifests a syntactic agreement with the verbal predicate in sentences, while in all other usages it is deprived of such syntactic relationship. The present paper contains some polemical remarks concerning the theoretical status of the case as an inflectional category and the functional status of the vocative forms, as well as the alleged syntactic relationship between the vocative forms and the verbal predicatives, as described by S. Sharypkin.