ABSTRACT
One of the major achievements of modern syntax is that all the different relations that are standardly referred to as ‘Case assignments’ have been unified under a single syntactic relation, namely, a specifier-head relation holding between a noun phrase and a proper functional head (see Chomsky 1995 and references cited there). In this chapter, I would like to address some questions concerning the nature of the so called Vocative Case that naturally arise under such perspective. As a premise, let me notice that the literature concerning Vocative Case is unusually scarce, especially if compared with the literature concerning other Cases. I think that this is not accidental, for the very existence of a specific morphological Vocative Case has been often denied as will be shown on the base of some citations from classical works in the field.
