Welcome to the Homepage of the international conference “The Grammar of Personal Names - A Typological Perspective”, taking place at the University of Regensburg in Germany, October 7-8 2010.

Invited speakers

Mark van de Velde (Paris CNRS; confirmed),

Willy Van Langendonck (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven; confirmed)

Dmitry Idiatov (Universiteit Antwerpen; confirmed)
 

Background and Goals of the conference

Proper names are perhaps a universal class of expressions. The typical and most important members of this class are anthroponyms, i.e. names that refer to human individuals and toponyms, i.e. names that refer to distinct places. They are lexical units of various morphological and syntactic complexity, i.e. they may be single lexical morphemes, morphological complex words, or multiword syntactic constructions. The morphosyntactic behavior of proper names deviates significantly from that of other syntactic categories such as common nouns and personal pronouns. Within the noun phrase proper names show various distributional restrictions compared to common nouns. On the other hand, they have usually more distributional possibilities than e.g. personal pronouns. In addition, proper names often exhibit deviations with regard to the coding of the core grammatical relations within the clause. For instance, proper names may show different case marking patterns compared to common nouns and personal pronouns. Furthermore, one can find specific morphological categories such as the vocative case and the proper name marker in the languages of the world, which are more or less confined to proper names as a syntactic category.

Given these facts, it is astonishing that proper names are a largely neglected topic of research in linguistic typology. The reasons for this ignorance may have to do with the semantic peculiarities of proper names and with a remarkable lack of data and morphosyntactic information on proper names in descriptive grammars. The meaning of proper names is often considered as purely pragmatic (i.e. referential), a view that is certainly influenced by the philosophical debates on names (e.g. Kripke). If they have no conventionalized form-meaning relation, they are less interesting as a topic of typological research. However, it is easy to show that proper names have semantic content, e.g. they may indicate the sex of the name bearer. If descriptive grammars deal with proper names at all, they are often simply presented as a kind of subclass of common nouns without any specific investigation of their morphosyntactic properties.  Since descriptive grammars are the prime data source for typologists, proper names remain a difficult topic for cross-linguistic comparison.

The descriptive and comparative research on proper names may have also an impact on more general and theoretical questions in typology:

1) It is a tacit assumption that proper names are a universal class of expressions. However, it remains to be shown or to be falsified that this is so. It is a theoretical possibility that there are languages without a lexical class of proper names. How could a language without proper names look like?

2) Secondly, descriptive grammars as well as typological research on parts-of-speech systems (e.g. Croft, Langacker, Hopper/ Thompson and others) notoriously disagree on the question how to classify proper names. Are they rather prototypical (cf. Van Langendonck) or rather non-prototypical (cf. Langacker, Croft) members of the syntactic category noun, or are they rather indexical expressions and hence closer to personal pronouns (Andersons)? The research on proper names will have an impact on the wider theory of parts of speech, perhaps central positions in current theories of parts of speech have to be revised.

3) And thirdly, many versions of the animacy hierarchy (alternatively: empathy hierarchy, agentivity hierarchy) contain proper names and/or kinship terms on a position between personal pronouns and common nouns designating humans (cf. Silverstein, Dixon, and others). However, the evidence for the inclusion of proper names/ kinship terms in the animacy hierarchy is astonishingly thin. The systematic investigation of peculiarities of the case marking of proper names in particular with regard to the coding of core grammatical relations will either confirm or falsify this hypothesis and will cast more empirical light on this famous hierarchy.

It is the main goal of the proposed conference to address the questions posed above and to fill the gaps of our linguistic knowledge on proper names in the languages of the world. Papers that present a descriptive perspective on proper names in European but also and preferably in non-European languages are as welcome as papers that deal with the more general typological questions mentioned above.