This paper revisits speaker-affective vocatives in Italo-Romance involving a ‘reverse’ lexical indexation of the speaker-addressee relationship (Mess. *basta, **a nonnuzza**, basta* ‘enough, **my dear** [lit. the granny], that’s enough’, said by grandmother to grandchild). Our basic premise is that the empirical patterns of Italo-Romance address inversion reveal that the distinction between ‘regular’ addressee-oriented vocatives and speaker-oriented vocatives is not merely interpretative but syntactic, with theoretical significance for the modelling of the grammar-discourse interface in the nominal domain (Espinal 2013; Akkuş & Hill 2018; Ritter & Wiltschko 2019). By reframing the empirical facts within the TOPOLOGICAL MAPPING THEOREM (TMT) of the ‘grammar of reference’ (Longobardi 2005; Sheehan & Hinzen 2011; Martín & Hinzen 2014)—on which the grammatical architecture *yields* semantic reference—, we show how (Italo-Romance) vocatives and the speaker-addressee distinction can be ‘topologically’ mapped at the left edge of the nominal functional structure. Moreover, the distinction between Italo-Romance speaker- and addressee-oriented vocatives is argued to correspond to a phasal distinction, supporting the proposal that the grammar of reference is simultaneously a phasal model of grammar, wherein the ‘phases’ (Chomsky 2008) of recent syntactic theory instantiate referential-deictic units in the formal ontology of natural language (Arsenijević & Hinzen 2010; Sheehan & Hinzen 2011; Hinzen 2012).