PROPER NOUNS

Section 11-3 PROPER NOUNS

Personal names
Categories of given names and titles
Names of non-human animals
Names of places
Titles of artifacts and social institutions

The principal realization of a nominal is a noun (N), which grammarians normally assign to one of two separate classes: proper nouns and common nouns. A common noun requires a determiner to help give it reference to something specific, but the proper noun typically does not. In this section we are concerned with proper nouns, which class includes notably names given to individuals. Proper nouns do not normally require a determiner to make them definite.

Personal names.

In Western society a person will usually have a surname, which one inherits at birth from one’s family. In addition to the surname a person shortly after birth receives one or more forenames. Later in life the person may in certain settings, such as given by teammates in sports or by people in the workplace, receive a nickname (hypocorism) by which to be referred to on a familiar basis. The form of the forenames may be typical either of given names as a class or of a surname. Nicknames may be derived from either kind. There is so to speak “a pool of names” from which one selects a given name for a child. This pool contains smaller pools of names: 1) those appropriate for males, 2) those appropriate for females, and 3) family names, so that the child might honor or be admonished to honor a particular namesake in some related or unrelated family. Later in life people may also acquire attributes called titles, some preposed and some post-posed.

	(1)		My name is John George Adams, but his name was John Quincy Adams.
	(2)		May I introduce Doctor Jones and Nurse Smith?

Here is the reason that [P14] cannot contain a terminal constituent. There have to be additional branching rules to describe the constituency of personal names, one of the subclasses of nominals that consist of multiple proper nouns.

The linguist may analyze the structure of the personal name as a separate category. One such elaboration can be found on this website (Despain, 2006). This work also includes some analysis of place names, which we take no further here.

The last option in [P23] is the proper or common noun which may consist of a single word or a compound.

Categories of given names and titles.

Normally given names and in some cases titles categorize according to the sex of the person designated.

[+Masculine]_GN

_r MALE(x)

[–Masculine]_GN

_r FEMALE(x)

[+Masculine]_T

_r MALE(x)

[–Masculine]_T

_r FEMALE(x)

Names of non-human animals.

Animals that have entered the human social order often receive names from the store of given names normally given to persons. The assigner will customarily choose a name that by convention has come to be appropriate for the kind of animal or object according to its species and sex. In the past people have customarily given feminine names to objects that males typically use, such as automobiles and ships.

	(1)		My cat is Felix, my dog Lassie, and my horse Dobbin.
	(2)		This is Bessie my car and this is Sally my yacht.

CANINE

FELINE

BOVINE

EQUINE

… *

The relationship as we normally perceive it to hold between species produces a polytomous (having many cuts) family of features. Only one of these can be present on a given segment. They are mutually exclusive like the feature of [nPerson] or [nGender], except that the possible values of n are difficult if not impossible to establish. We could conveniently set the HUMAN species to one. This idea seems to bring syntax very squarely into the field of semantics.