Possessive predicational vocatives in Scandinavian

Abstract Scandinavian is known to have vocative phrases that contain a possessive second person pronoun and a noun, and possibly also one or more adjectives, as in the Norwegian example din lille fjott, which means ‘you little dork’ although din is formally identical to the possessive pronoun for second person singular. In this paper, I will show that possessive predicational vocatives, as I call them, involve a predication which is parallel to ordinary predicational structures where the noun is marked with an indefinite determiner, as du er en liten fjott ‘you are a little dork’. The two cons... Mehr ...