Towards the Communicative Relevance of the German Vocative (Based on the German Prose Texts)

Abstract

Within the framework of developing anthropocentric linguistic paradigm the vocative is defined as a communication act. Since the vocative is connected to the speech acts, it is analyzed not as a lexical unit of a language, but as a communicative unit addressed to the recipient. The speech act is always a part of discourse, of speech embedded in life and included in the process of real-life human communication. Pragmatic potential of the vocative and all of its functions are implemented in the discourse. According to the theory of speech acts the language is means of reciprocal influence of the speakers, and linguistic units are used according to the context and situation. It is the communicative situation that forms pragmatic component of a speech act, which includes the properties of the speaker and the recipient and their relationship. The verbal means which are directed towards communicativepragmatic frame of communication include the vocative. The pragmatic aspect of the utterance manifests asymmetry between the form and content of the vocative. Similar discord comes to light in a communicative situation in which the speaker’s relation to the hearer doesn’t correlate with the socialroles of participants in communication. Due to the lack of unequivocal correlation between denotatum and the lexical word the information is surplused and the meaning of the statements becomes enriched and ample. In similar cases the vocatives indicate subjective attitude of the speaker towards the hearer. The speech material for analysis is obtained from texts of German fiction and is analyzed through the lens of the context or the communicative situation.