Vocative case

Common card · No. 278427

In grammar, the vocative case (abbreviated voc) is a grammatical case which is used for a noun that identifies a person (animal, object, etc.) being addressed or occasionally for the noun modifiers (determiners, adjectives, participles, and numerals) of that noun. However, recent literature contains lively debate about the extent to which such vocative suffixes share crucial properties with prototypical case; see Maché (2025) for an extensive discussion. Typically, case is assigned by verbs, prepositions, nouns, or adjectives to their complements. In the case of vocatives, this is less straightforward, since there is no phonologically realised assigner. Moreover, some languages, including Bulgarian, have lost all overt realisation of case assigned by verbs and prepositions while retaining vocative suffixes. Moreover, there are languages such as Mandarin that do not mark distinct cases with overt morphology but nevertheless feature vocative markers. In many other languages, the realisation...

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