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Eugenia E. Romanova
Institute of Philosophy and Law of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Ekaterinburg, Russia
ARE NAMES REALLY PROPER NOUNS?
Review of the books: Reina, J. C., & Helmbrecht, J. (Eds.), Proper Names versus Common Nouns: Morphosyntactic Contrasts in the Languages of the World. Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2022. 263 p.; Stolz, T., & Nintemann, J. Special Onymic Grammar in Typological Perspective: Cross-Linguistic Data, Recurrent Patterns, Functional Explanations. Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2024. xviii + 257 p.
For citation
Romanova, E. E. (2025). Are Names Really Proper Nouns? [Review of: Proper Names versus Common Nouns: Morphosyntactic Contrasts in the Languages of the World ed. by J. C. Reina and J. Helmbrecht, and Special Onymic Grammar in Typological Perspective: Cross-Linguistic Data, Recurrent Patterns, Functional Explanations by T. Stolz and J. Nintemann]. Voprosy onomastiki, 22(3), 307–313. https://doi.org/10.15826/vopr_onom.2025.22.3.038
Received on 11 August 2025
Accepted on 8 September 2025
Abstract: The review of two books on onomastic grammar outlines the issues raised by their authors without critique or discussion. In these works, grammatical features of proper names are systematically revealed to diverge from those of common nouns, and the distinctions go far beyond the most apparent one: the use of the definite article. In a vast array of languages, number, case, gender, possessive structures, quantification, syntactic distribution — all signal that proper names and common nouns fall into different (sub)categories. Moreover, proper names themselves are not homogenous: personal names and place names can clearly be set apart from each other in morphosyntactic expressions of spatial relations and adpositional selection, among other disparities. While the majority of contributions under review touch upon these issues, there are more original ones that digress from the general line. They either focus on a highly specific problem, or provide more detailed classification of proper names, showing that the division into just personal and place names seems insufficient. The books contain rich empirical data, and more than one linguistic perspective on their analysis. The review should give a taste of the current state of grammar research in onomastics.
Keywords: common nouns; proper names; personal names; place names; morphosyntax; linguistic typology; special onymic grammar
References
Jackendoff, R. (1991). Parts and Boundaries. Cognition, 41(1–3), 9–45. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(91)90031-X
Longobardi, G. (1994). Reference and Proper Names: A Theory of N-Movement in Syntax and Logical Form. Linguistic Inquiry, 25(4), 609–665.
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