12 Bulgarian Vocative in HPSG Petya N. Osenova and Kiril Iv. Simov 12.1 Introduction Crosslinguistically vocatives are an underexplored linguistic phenomen- on and in different languages they can be highly idiosyncratic and com- plex (Levinson, 1987, p.71). Therefore, the problem, which is discussed in this paper, is not a language-specific one, in spite of the fact that most of the languages have their own repositories for marking the role of the addressee in the communicative utterances. In our opinion this linguistic phenomenon needs its adequate treat- ment in HPSG because of three main reasons: 1. The vocative is supposed to be present on two levels: syntax and pragmatics. Therefore it needs more elaborate interpretation on the interface side, which, in HPSG, is more developed for mor- phology/syntax and syntax/semantics than syntax/pragmatics. Note that a challenge for the theory is the semantic weight of the vocatives with respect to the head sentence. 2. It will be useful for HPSG-oriented implementations, especially treebanks and dialogue systems. 3. On prosodic grounds the vocatives are often viewed as being ’side or extended parts’ of the sentence and therefore - very close to the parenthetical constructions. From our point of view, both phenomena are pragmatic and hence, the treatment of vocative, presented here, could be generalized to cover other phenomena of pragmatic nature. In our work the vocatives are viewed through the possibility of the integration/separation of their pragmatic, syntactic and semantic prop- erties. The Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on HPSG. Jong-Bok Kim and Stephen Wechsler. Copyright c  2003, Stanford University. 233