Culpeper, Jonathan / Kytö, Merja (2010): Early Modern English Dialogues: Spoken Interaction as Writing. Cambridge.

d’Avis, Franz / Meibauer, Jörg (2013): Du Idiot! Din idiot! Pseudo-vocative constructions and insults in German (and Swedish). In: Sonnenhauser, Barbara / Noel Aziz Hanna, Patrizia (pub.): Vocative! Addressing between system and performance. Berlin, Boston, 189–217.

Gillmann, Melitta / Imo, Wolfgang (2022): „Du rotziger Blasebalckemacherischer Dieb! Solst du mich dutzen?“ – Das funktionale Spektrum des Personalpronomens du in Gryphius‘ „Peter Squentz“. In: ZGL 49, 121–154.

Imo, Wolfgang / Wesche, Jörg (2023): Interaktionale Sprache bei Gryphius. Tübingen.

Linke, Angelika / Werth, Alexander (2022): ‚Du lose Galge – jhr meine lieben Freunde vnd Mittgenossen – O Cheel‘: Vokative in Komödien des 17. Jahrhunderts. In: Denkler, Markus / Elmentaler, Michael (Hrsg.): Bauernkomödien des 17. Jahrhunderts als sprachhistorische Quellen (Niederdeutsche Studien). Köln, 105–156.

Van Olmen, Daniel / Andersson, Marta / Culpeper, Jonathan (2023): Inherent linguistic politeness: The case of insultive YOU+NP in Dutch, English and Polish. In: Journal of Pragmatics 215, 22–40.

The pronoun of address + NP-pattern is a linguistic phenomenon that occurs not only in the German, but also in other European languages (cf. d’Avis/Meibauer 2013; Van Olmen/Anderson/Culpeper 2023). In spite of its prevalence, there is still not much research on that topic, even more so from a diachronic and interactional perspective. However, as Linke/Werth (2022) argue, the latter perspectives show a high potential for examining this particular type of vocative expressions in historical dramas, since dramas are highly dialogical and therefore offer an opportunity to compare contemporary interactional language use with a historical approximation (cf. Culpeper/Kytö 2010).
According to the authors, one of the functions of the pronoun of address + NP-pattern is to contextualize and invoke insultive utterances. In a recent paper, Van Olmen/Anderson/Culpeper (2023) come to the same conclusion on the basis of their analysis of the insultive YOU + NP-pattern in contemporary Dutch, English and Polish. Most occurrences of this structure in all three languages are explicitly insultive, expressed either by the lexical semantics of the noun itself (“you idiot”) or through the accompanying adjective (“you stupid boy”). Furthermore, they are used in situations where an insult makes ‘interactional sense’, e.g. within a reproach or heated argument. From this placement, this format gets its default reading of being insultive. Only few instances do not allow an insultive reading, and even those emerge within sequences of bantering or irony, which are situated on the borderline of face-threatening activities. Instances that carry a clearly positive ascription are rare.
Taking into consideration the particularities of analyzing dramas as historical data, this poster will show that not only from the synchronic but also from the diachronic perspective the pronoun of address + NP-format is a persistent linguistic pattern in German. Based on the examined collection of instances from a corpus of 31 German dramas from the Baroque period, the Enlightenment, Sturm und Drang and Classicism, the following aspects will be addressed: (i) Which pronouns are used within this pattern? (ii) How are the instances distributed across the periods (mid-16th to early 19th century) as well as subgenres (e.g. tragedy or comedy)? (iii) In which functional contexts do the interactants mobilize this structure?
The poster will not only reflect that the pattern pronoun of address + NP has indeed a long tradition of being used in insults (cf. Gillmann/Imo 2022: 145f. for an exemplary analysis of such an insult in Gryphius’ play “Peter Squentz”). But it also shall initiate a discussion of the analytical possibilities and limitations of interaction-centered approaches to historical data (cf. Imo/Wesche 2023).