Proper Names and the “Noun”/“Name” Categories: Pseudo-Nouns, Real Names

This chapter summarises a number of arguments regarding the syntactic and semantic nouniness of proper names, which are not nouns (or noun phrases) but nominals that imitate the syntactic and semantic behaviour of (common) nouns. As such, they really are pseudo-nouns. However, the semantic role they play is not devoid of categorising potential—thanks to their parallel with nouns—and that makes them perfectly good names, on a cline from identification to categorisation.