In some languages, even names take articles. Fairly un-exotic examples of these include some dialects of German and Scandinavian. However, we can go on and do some fairly interesting things here.
We can obviously distinguish a variety of social status and age by such articles, but another thing we could include in them would be mood! We can of course also consider case, if we go for a German-style system with case distinguished in articles. However, subtypes of the vocative could have different markings - maybe also distinguishing a different number of subtypes in different social statuses, and maybe also distinguishing both the status of speaker and recipient. Consider, imperatives. A particle could easily change to indicate that the verb is to be parsed as a command, or indeed as a confirmation of a command. An article could also indicate that the verb is meant as a question to the listener. One could also imagine various optatives and jussives and the like having special markings with names (but no special markings on other NPs, where auxiliaries, independent particles and verb forms serve the whole heavy lifting duties.)
However, one could also have the question-articles appear on non-vocatives whenever the addressee also is a participant in the verb phrase, so some non-vocative cases also may need to have question-address-forms. A system where some cases are conflated may appear with those forms.
The historical origin of these forms may be rich in different types of lexemes: verbs ('hear', 'do', '(I) obey', etc...), nouns ('boss', 'word (to)'), adjectives ('kind', 'right', 'worthy', etc), adverbs ('immediately'), etc. The dividing line between these and cognates in the language is that stress patterns for these have been different, leading to significantly different sound changes over time.
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