Vocatives with determiners

In some varieties of Spanish (American, above all), possessives can appear in vocative constructions such as Mi niña, ¿qué haces? (lit. 'My girl, what are you doing?') in contrast to the generalization that vocatives refuse definite articles (Bosque 1996, Leonetti 1999, 2016). The aim of t...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autor: González López, Laura
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2020
País:España
Institución:Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Repositorio:Dipòsit Digital de Documents de la UAB
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:ddd.uab.cat:232217
Acceso en línea:https://ddd.uab.cat/record/232217
https://dx.doi.org/urn:doi:10.5565/rev/isogloss.59
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Vocatives
Possessives
Spanish variation
Syntactic analysis
Corpus
Descripción
Sumario:In some varieties of Spanish (American, above all), possessives can appear in vocative constructions such as Mi niña, ¿qué haces? (lit. 'My girl, what are you doing?') in contrast to the generalization that vocatives refuse definite articles (Bosque 1996, Leonetti 1999, 2016). The aim of this investigation is to explain why this happen and to propose a syntactic analysis that explains these cases and reflects the data obtained by some spoken (PRESSEA) and written corpora (CREA). The analysis is based on Eguren (to appear) and Leonetti (1999) for possessives, and Espinal (2013) and Hill (2014) for vocatives. The conclusions predict that, in those varieties in which possessives are compatible with a real determiner (un mi amigo que es muy pobrecito, lit. 'a my friend that is very poor'), we obtain a prenominal possessive in vocatives (mi amigo que es muy pobrecito, lit. 'my friend that is very poor') as a result of the possessive's movement to [Specifier, IP] (amigo mío.