What is interesting, however, is the way in which these nouns appear to be used in relatively marked pragmatic contexts, in which their use as a vocative form appears to add disparaging or endearing values -precisely the kind of values that, as we saw above, diminutive forms may also express.
This is clearly not the place to attempt the solution of a particularly difficult editorial crux; however, this is probably indicative of the difficulty of analyzing vocative forms. On the one hand, the change would be plausible, because the vocative form could be seen to be equivalent to my lad, and might therefore be independent of the first name.
People of the estado llano, he argues, used vos as an almost exclusive singular
vocative form; the only situations in which one consistently heard tu were in dialogues involving servants, when parents spoke to children, and when one addressed him/herself to an animal or an inanimate object (90-94).
Such statement is right in philological terms, in as much as the Italian Jesuit realized that padme is a
vocative form of padma, although he did not venture to provide a translation of the spell.
Still, a closer look at intercalation in romances shows a surprisingly consistent pattern: with few exceptions, it occurs consistently in dialogic turns in the first line and in 58.33% of cases it follows a
vocative form of a noun, usually a personal name, the choice of reporting verbs is limited to seggen (54.17%) and cwepen (43.75%) with the negligible 2.08% of other verbs.
Furthermore, although his older beach companion "Jaschiu" (Mann's phonetic spelling of "Jasio," the
vocative form of the name "Jas") also existed, and was called Jan Fudakowski, he was in reality Adzio's junior by a few months and therefore neither the "sturdy lad with brilliantined black hair" of the novella nor, afortiori, the muscular hunk, visibly in his late teens or even early twenties, of the film that Luchino Visconti adapted from the book in 1971.
In the fourth verse of Kyrie 4, vivifice cannot be translated as the imperative "vivify" (which would have been vivifica), but rather must be read as the
vocative form of the noun vivificus ("life-giving" or "life-giver").
Note that singular oblique and
vocative forms of Urdu noun b@cha 'child' are identical to its plural nominative form.
It charts increasing analyticity in the language as indicated by the growing numbers of indeclinable nouns, zero endings in the genitive plural of masculine nouns ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.]),
vocative forms with zero endings ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.]), indeclinable adjectives ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.]), and in the increasing incidence of non-declension of elements in compound numerals.
However, though marked by
vocative forms, apostrophe is not dialogue, for even if the addressee is part of the orator's audience and thus can "hear" the apostrophe, conventionally the addressee does not reply.