Un análisis contrastivo de los vocativos en español y en alemán

Abstract

Vocatives play an important role for establishing and maintaining social contacts in human communication. Given the functional and formal diversity in their culture-specific realisation, this study, based on two spoken corpora of everyday conversations in Spanish and German, compares the use of different types of vocatives in these two languages, especially from a pragmatic and sociolinguistic point of view. Firstly, we present a brief review on the communicative functions of vocatives and describe the tertium comparationis, the methodology and the corpora used for this study. Then, we compare the frequency of Spanish and German vocatives in different conversational settings. What emerges is greater tendency to use vocatives in the Spanish data, especially for reinforcing social contact within the conversations. As far as the variation of vocative-forms is concerned, this contrastive analysis reveals different pragmatic and sociolinguistic functions of last-name-vocatives, endearment-terms and the use of the pronouns tú and du, whereas both languages share the proclivity to recur to vocatives for attenuating face threatening speech acts.