vocative case
- noun
- /ˈvoʊkətɪv keɪs/
- Specialized
:
caso vocativo
- And if you have a good repertoire of songs to draw from, you'll find it easier to remember such things as the genders of nouns or how to form the genitive and vocative cases.
Examples
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The vocative case is used in English to address someone directly, as in 'Hello, John!'
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A woman never addresses her husband directly, using the vocative case, nor will a man address his wife in that manner...
Academic text (1991) -
But, all in all, an emphasis might be felt in the last line, and that is why I eliminated <f> and <1> and chose <d> and <e>, the vocative case.
Academic text (2006) -
In the Japanese language, when the subject, the object, and the vocative case are expected to be designated clearly, we put -ha (or -ga), -wo, and -yo respectively after a noun.
Academic text (2006) -
In Latin, the name Marcus is expressed as 'Marce' in the vocative case when calling for him.
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Understanding the vocative case helps learners know how to address someone formally in languages like Polish.
Synonyms
A form of a name or word used when you call someone directly
Surface Forms
Morphology
The phrase is fully compositional: 'vocative' identifies the function (direct address) and 'case' names a grammatical case, so together they denote the grammatical case used for direct address. This follows the common 'X case' naming pattern and is cross-linguistically recognizable, so a B1 learner who knows both constituents should understand it.
Etymology
Vocative case comes from Latin and the word vocative is from a verb meaning 'to call'. Imagine someone saying 'O friend!' or shouting a name to get attention, and in many languages the noun takes a special form in this situation. So the vocative case is the special form used when you 'directly address' someone.
