In written dialogue and letters, as in daily conversation, we sometimes use the names of the people we’re addressing. These names are called nouns of direct address:
Mr. Smith, I’d like to speak with you, please.
I don’t like to be disappointed, and you, Renfru, disappoint me.
Sometimes nouns of direct address are common nouns that apply to one person or an entire audience:
My friend, I hope you will take my advice.
This news, my friends, should comfort us all.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to our forty-first annual vase juggling competition.
The noun of direct address is always enclosed by a pair of commas, and it has no grammatical function in the sentence.
That is, it’s not considered part of the subject or the predicate. It has a social function: to get the attention of the person addressed, or to clarify who is being addressed.
Sometimes, if the context doesn’t resolve ambiguities, readers may confuse nouns of address and appositives:
Your supervisor, Mr. Watley, told you to finish that project.
If Mr. Watley is the supervisor, then the words Mr. Watley are an appositive. If Mr. Watley is the person being addressed, then Mr. Watley is a noun of direct address. We can usually depend on the larger context to clarify this.
POINTS FOR WRITERS
1. Restrictive and non-restrictive appositives.
Here comes a distinction that is seldom understood and often ignored.
They’re So Common: More on Nouns | 177
Sometimes the pair of commas is not used with the appositive, depending on the larger context. In the first example below, the writer has more than one daughter; in the second, he has only one:
My daughter Mary plays the tuba.
My daughter, Mary, plays the tuba.
In the first example, Mary is a restrictive appositive:
it restricts (or limits) the meaning of daughter. In the second example, the non-restrictive appositive Mary simply provides supplementary information. (And in this case the commas contribute nothing to understanding the sentence.)
Here are more examples of restrictive appositives, followed by non-restrictive examples:
RESTRICTIVE: My cousin Bob plays the harmonica.
NON-RESTRICTIVE: My cousin, Bob, plays the harmonica.
RESTRICTIVE: Our custodian Mr. Halley does good work.
NON-RESTRICTIVE: Our custodian, Mr. Halley, does good work.
In both cases the restrictive appositive, without the commas, is used to identify a specific cousin or custodian out of many.
When in doubt, add the commas. Few (if any) readers will object, or even notice, if you’re wrong, and the commas seldom if ever alter the meaning of the sentence significantly. But if you add the first comma, don’t forget the second.
EXERCISES
15a. What’s the difference in writing between regular plural nouns, possessive nouns, and plural possessive nouns? Write an example that illustrates each category, using words that have regular plurals.
For example: cats, cat’s, and cats’.
15b. Write plural, singular possessive, and plural possessive forms of the following nouns: woman, ox, church, tomato, piano, medium (e.g., the medium of TV), boss, and octopus. Use a dictionary when you need to.
15c. In the following sentences, identify the sentences that contain nouns of address, appositives, and expletives, and underline those structures. In sentences with expletives, identify the complete subject of the sentence. A sentence may contain more than one of these structures. In some cases, the function of the phrase may not be clear within the limited context.
Examples:
My brother Ed has left. [Appositive]
Dwight, see if his brother has left. [Noun of address]
There are no printer cartridges in the supply closet.
[There is an expletive, and no printer cartridges is the subject.]
1. Dr. Kildare, you can speak with my assistant.
2. June, speak with my physician, Dr. Kildare.
3. Your brother, Alice, is remarkable.
4. There is rain forecast for tomorrow.
5. It is clear that Ed is a menace.
16 Zowie! Interjections and the Eight Parts of Speech
The interjection is a common grammatical category, and a simple one, for any word or group of words that we use to express shock, surprise, pain, joy, admiration, and a wide range of other feelings and responses.
INTERJECTIONS
Interjections are used by themselves or as part of a sentence:
Good grief!
Cool!
Oh, no!
My.
What now?
Interjections have no distinctive form. They can be single words or longer phrases; they can be joined to sentences by commas or dashes, or they can stand independently, ending with periods, question marks, or exclamation marks:
What the heck?
Well, great.
Wow!
Oy!
Some interjections serve social purposes: greetings (Hello, Goodbye); pauses (Let’s see, Well . . .); politeness (Please, Thanks);
or agreement or disagreement (Yes, No, Yeah, Nah, Maybe, Sure!
Says you! Yeah, right! Baloney!).
Some interjections are the kinds of words you use when you drop a hammer on your foot—the words your mother told you to stop using. (You know the words we mean.)
Other interjections are not even actual words, but merely sounds that have become conventional ways to express things:
Ouch! Yikes! Sheesh! Oof! Oops! Hubba-hubba! Whoopee! and, in the upper Midwestern states, Uff-da! They are generally easy to recognize.
The most important thing to know about interjections is that, although they are useful for self-expression and social interaction, they play no grammatical role in the sentence. In analyzing the grammar of a sentence, you can disregard the interjections.
Some grammar books classify some of these words as adverbs, though they clearly do not modify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs. (Some could arguably be sentence modifiers, which we’ll examine in Chapter 20.) For our purposes, calling them interjections is sufficient.