“Help me move to that, blood”. A corpus-based study of the syntax and pragmatics of vocatives in the language of British teenagers

Findings indicate that vocatives are clearly more frequent in the speech of British teenagers than in that of adult speakers. As expected, the majority of these items occur in final position. Regarding pragmatics, they serve a wide variety of functions, both interpersonal (summoning attention, creating solidarity among the speakers) and/or discourse-related (topic and turn management). We even find cases of more than one used in the same turn, and also examples of their metalinguistic use in reported speech. Finally, some of these vocatives have generally lost their deictic reference to the addressee, or may even adopt features of another category, such as pronouns, as in the case of man.