Address inversion in southern Italian dialects

This article proposes a ‘topological’ reinterpretation of the extended nominal architecture in relation to southern Italo-Romance vocatives with and without allocuzione inversa (‘address inversion’, Renzi 1968), phenomenon involving ‘inverse’ lexical indexation speaker-addressee relationship (reg.It. Mangia, papà! ‘Eat up, little one!’, father child). Topological Mapping Theory (Longobardi 2005; Martín & Hinzen 2014) posits unified model grammatical structure reference denotation argumental constituents, where hierarchy referentiality (from predicativity deixis) emerges through expansion functional architecture. Contributing growing theoretical consensus favouring extra ‘vocative’ left periphery, I argue that address inversion involve part-whole structure, yielding necessarily tripartite (VocP-DP-NP) line topological principles. The non-literal interpretation N observed ‘lexical flip’ is argued be surface manifestation movement into VocP, space whose internal articulation serves construe ostensive-deictic possibilities an object-referring expression at exophoric level.