Assessing the Awareness of English Foreign Language  College Students in ' Vocatives'

Khairy Al- Rifai, Nadya

	Assessing the Awareness of English Foreign Language College Students in ' Vocatives'
journal of kerbala university
Article 1, Volume 2, Issue 4, 2006, Pages 428-433 PDF (0 K)
Author
Nadya Khairy Al- Rifai
Abstract
Vocative case is considered as one of the seventh noun cases in modern English besides (nominative , genitive , dative , accusative , locative , and instrumental case). The term 'vocative' is mainly taken from 'voco' which means 'call' in Latin (Huddeston,1981:199 ; Balme,1996:11 ).This case is used ( in some inflected languages) when the referent of the noun is being addressed . The vocative case ( also called the fifth case)* is the case used for a noun identifying the person ( animal , object , etc.) being addressed and / or occasionally the determiners of the noun. A vocative expression is an expression of direct address, wherein the identity of the party being spoken to is set forth expressly within a sentence ( Wikipedia Encyclopedia:1996,15). The vocative case indicated in Arabic by the particle 'ya'(Arabic:يا )placed before a noun. In English translations , this is often translated literally as 'O' instead of being omitted (Ibid.) . In this case the two languages , i.e. , Arabic and English , differ in the expression (s) used for a vocative . This element of the English language system is not studied thoroughly at college level. EFL Iraqi college students have no idea about the vocative case in English. Therefore, this study is an attempt to answer the following questions: 1-What is the level of Iraqi EFL college students in recognizing the vocative case in English? 2-Are Iraqi EFL college students aware of the different types of vocative case in English? So , this study aims at finding out the level of Iraqi EFL college students in recognizing the types of vocative case in English language . The following null hypothesis is posed: The level of Iraqi EFL college students in recognizing the types of vocative case is below the theoretical mean . To the best of the researcher's knowledge , no other study in Iraq has tackled the problem before .Therefore , it is necessary to fill the gap. It is hoped that the results of the present study will shed light on the real problems and difficulties as well as the level of the Iraqi EFL college students in dealing with this topic

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