Analysis of the vocative in the literary dialogues of the 14th century: A contrastive study of “Libro del cauallero Zifar” and “Libro de Buen Amor”

Abstract

The analysis of progressive syntactic and pragmatic changes in narratives is essential to understand the constitution of the modern Spanish we speak today. Specifically, dialogue sequences in literary works are one of the fundamental means to study past orality since they can sometimes represent colloquial speech. This work will cover the study of one of the most representative linguistic phenomena that are part of the dialogical level, the vocative, taking as object of study two literary works of the 14th century: Libro del Cauallero Zifar and El Libro de Buen Amor, both of recognized importance for Spanish literature. In this paper, the functions of the vocative will be analyzed on the basis of its form, thus trying to shed light on the functioning of the different communicative strategies of the interlocutors of the dialogue and the linguistic behavior of the characters within the analyzed literary works.