“Tô notando, sô!” The vocative particle sô and the syntactic -pragmatic interface

Abstract

Moreira (2005, 2008) and Moreira and Alkmim (2013) observe that the form senhor and number and gender and number variants are frequently used as a vocative in constructions taken from plays written by authors from Minas Gerais in the 19th and 20th centuries. Considering the works cited above, our hypothesis is that the incidence of the use of the form senhor as a vocative in final position resulted in a process of grammaticalization that originated the reduced forms of this item: sinhô, seu, siô, sôr e sô. In this article, based on intuition and evaluation data from native speakers, we aim to describe and analyze the constructions in which the item sô is realized. We follow Hill (2007, 2014), who places the vocative in the syntactic structure, considering the pragmatic function that this item performs. As a result, we present tree configurations corresponding to the constructions in which the item sô is realized, as well as considerations about the vocative in the syntactic structure of the dialect of Minas Gerais.