Dániel Z. Kádár ON HISTORICAL CHINESE VOCATIVE SHIFTS A DISCOURSE ANALYTIC STUDY Albany. “Sir, by your patience, I hold you but a subject of this war, Not as a brother. […] Stay yet, hear reason. Edmund, I arrest Thee On capital treason;” (“King Lear”, Act V. Sc. III.) 1. Introduction 1 In the historical pragmatic research of vocatives, which began in the late 1950s 2 , the examination of vocative shifts (henceforth VSs) as markers of changes in interpersonal relationships has become a prevalent research topic. Several scholars have argued that, even though the study of terms of address reveals much information about the basic emotional and social relationships among the protagonists of historical texts, the retrospective analysis of strate- 1 I would like to express my gratitude to Huba Bartos for reviewing the manuscript of the pre- sent paper, and to Ben Mousley for stylistic corrections. I would also like to express my appre- ciation to the reviewer of the manuscript, whose suggestions helped me enormously in develop- ing the present paper. 2 Many scholars agree that the modern historical pragmatic research of ‘vocative systems’ began with the publication of the papers Gilman and Brown 1958, and Brown and Gilman 1960. On the development of the historical pragmatic research of vocatives see more in Braun 1988, pp. 14-44.