diagramming vocatives

Daniel Riaño danielrr at mad.servicom.es
Fri Apr 30 01:40:19 EDT 1999



The syntagm in vocative is always a sentence, with impresive-expresive
function, not subordinated or co-ordinated to the sentence it is embedded
in (or placed in front of, in Homer, etc).

 Therefor, I follow the following schema: I connect the vocative syntagm to
the whole sentence: the whole sentence tree is on the left, the branch that
points to the vocative, on the right. In the top of the tree I put not just
the "O"(ration) (or S(entence))" tag, but a special label I call
"O"(ration) (or S(entence)) in context".

As an abstract example:


                           Or. in Cont.
                   -------------------------
                   |                              |
                   |                              |
                   |                              |
	O                           (syntagm in vocative)
          ---------------
          |                 |
          |                 |
         SV	        Sub.
     ----------       ----------
    |            |      |            |
   ...          ...   ...          ...

I am writing now for a paper the theoretical foundations for that, but you
must be thinking by now what an ugly thing to read it should be if written
by me in English!
Nota Bene: I do not diagram: I parse the text in a special editor and tell
the program to do the diagramming for me: It is much faster!



>>Message text written by Jonathan Ryder:
>
>>I'm currently teaching myself simplified diagramming/sentence flow as a
>>technique for working out how sentences, clauses fit together. Can
>>anybody who 'diagrams' tell me how they treat vocatives or address,
>>usually with 2nd person verb? Do you use put it in the subject 'slot'?
>
>Jonathan,
>
>I just position the vocative in the subject slot.  However, I put the
>vocative
>in parentheses.  It works well for me.
>
>Jon R. Venema
>Western Seminary

------------------------------------------------
Daniel Riaño Rufilanchas
Madrid, España





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