Ricerc@Sapienza

This paper investigates the phenomenon of nominative pro vocative within the corpus of Greek inscriptions of Sicily. In some funerary epigraphs the imperative form χαῖρε refers to a noun in the nominative instead of vocative case. The examples have been collected and distinguished in categories depending on which element of the vocative phrase shows the nominative form. We found that factors of different levels interact to motivate the nominatives in each group of these instances, creating contexts where the case replacement can be more expected: a low degree of allocutiveness, a syntactic process of linguistic economy and a particular semantic feature of proper names.