Traditional, Structuralist, and Textlinguistic Approaches to the (Latin) Vocative

A critical review of various theories reveals the need to see the vocative in the context of the speech act and on the highest level of the monolog (and not on the sentence level) through a descending analysis. The vocative cannot be correctly understood in reductionist theories without speaker and addressee, which tend to ignore the vocative or to deny its status as a case. In line with these findings, a short but complete Latin text is analysed in a tagmemic framework.