ABSTRACT
Every language has a vocative means of directly addressing people by calling them out, attracting their attention, or naming them explicitly. Although it receives less attention than other constructions, literature on vocative devices reveals a disagreement in their interpretation. Specifically, while some researchers consider them as part of an inflectional system like, for example, a morphological case, others characterize vocatives as functional structures, concerning “language use” only. This chapter argues that Basaa (a Bantu language spoken in Cameroon) has grammaticalized the vocative as an independent semantic case but still functions as a predicate in the sense of Blake (2001). In Basaa, the vocative case is marked morphologically with the use of a particle which conveys no syntactic relation to an appellative function. The chapter presents a detailed description of the Basaa facts which is situated within typological studies of inflectional morphology and speech act distinctions (Nichols & Bickel, 2005). It is shown that while the vocative particle à ́ is a concatenative inflectional formative, more complex structures show that it functions as a specific type of utterance.
