Studies in Language. International Journal sponsored by the Foundation “Foundations of Language” - Volume 9, Issue 1, 1985

A critical review of various theories reveals the need to see the vocative in the context of the speech act and on the highest level of the monolog (and not on the sentence level) through a descending analysis. The vocative cannot be correctly understood in reductionist theories without speaker and addressee, which tend to ignore the vocative or to deny its status as a case. In line with these findings, a short but complete Latin text is analysed in a tagmemic framework.

The ordering of subject and object, especially in the so-called clause "middle-field," is a perennial problem both for the grammar of German, and for syntactic theories of linearization. While formalist accounts (e.g. Engel, 1977) and semantic accounts (e.g. Lerenz, 1977a) have made valuable contributions to an understanding of S/O order, their monocausal approaches have only limited descriptive adequacy. This paper presents evidence that the ordering of S and O in the clause middle-field in German results from the interaction of multiple cognitive performance factors: agency, animacy, situational definiteness, and contextual givenness.