Imagine a language with vocatives and with case congruence on adjectives. Further imagine the language has some kind of intensive or superlative adjective formation, either of indo-european style or just some kind of more general intensifying meaning.
Now, it would be rather natural that vocatives never use non-intensive/non-superlative adjectives; the actual meaning-change involved would be somewhat negated by the presence of the vocative, though, as even a 'good' friend would be called 'best friend!' in such a construction, and everyone was aware of the grammatical rule there. Thus, lexical items would have to be used instead to distinguish intensities instead of morphological devices.
One could even imagine a language where there are no explicit vocative markers, except the restriction on non-superlatives in vocative NPs. One could of course have some (morphologically) superlative/intensive dummy adjective for this role too, if no other adjective is present?
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