Abstract
This paper takes issue with the predicativist’s identification of proper names and common count nouns. Although Predicativism emerges precisely to account for certain syntactic facts about proper names, namely, that they behave like common count nouns on occasions, it seems clear that proper names and common count nouns have different properties, and this undermines the thesis that proper names are in fact just common count nouns. The predicativist’s strategy to bridge these differences is to postulate an unpronounced determiner to go with names when they appear to function as singular terms, making them effectively a concealed determiner phrase. In this paper I revisit these differences and argue that the predicativist’s strategy is not well justified and worse, it does not help make proper names and common count nouns unified; rather, it makes proper names exceptional as count nouns. I also discuss the referentialist’s take on names qua predicates and make some suggestions about how the syntactic difference between proper names and count nouns should be understood.
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Notes
Or just count nouns. Fara (2015) argues that proper names are a species of count noun that is not common. See below for a reply.
See fn 22.
These arguments aim to show that names with articles in these languages do not function semantically like definite descriptions in a number of environments. Unfortunately, for reasons of space, we cannot discuss these cases in this paper.
Note that what is meant by the rule is that count nouns cannot appear bare in the singular in argument position as count nouns, that is, while receiving its count noun interpretation. Many count nouns typically also have mass term or kind denoting interpretations and when they do, they typically appear bare, i.e. ‘Lamb is tasty’; ‘Language is complex’. So the exceptions to this rule should be cases where a count noun appears bare while having a count noun interpretation.
As ‘referential term’ I mean here a syntactically simple individual-denoting expression, as opposed to an individual-denoting expression that could include complex expressions (definite descriptions, complex demonstratives, what-phrases, etc.). This is the way the notion of referential term is used in the debate by all parties.
Not everyone may have the intuition that these uses of these terms are referential. However, consider an anaphoric sentence, e.g., ‘?Mum came in, and another one arrived right after’, where ‘Mum’ does not serve as anaphoric anchor for ‘one’, but it should if it was still functioning as a count noun in that sentence. Or compare, ‘Every time a child fails the exam, Mum complains about the teaching’ with ‘Every time a child fails the exam, the mum complains about the teaching’, where the co-varying reading of the later is not so available in the former. Gray (2018) also discusses these cases to argue that these terms have referential or individual-denoting meanings derived from their usual predicative meanings.
Note that Hawthorne & Manley flag this possibility “None of this demonstrates that no deep semantic shift from predicate to referential term has occurred” (Hawthorne & Manley, 2012, 220).
Note the lack of quotation marks around ‘N’ in the construction ‘it is called N’. Fara, following Matushansky (2008, 2015), gives an argument to the effect that in naming constructions the name is not mentioned but used, and it is effectively a predicate (Fara, 2015, 65–69). It seems to me, however, that what predicativists apparently mean by being called N, boils down to the same property we have been designating all along with being called ‘N’–that is, the property of having ‘N’ as a name, bearing ‘N’, being named with ‘N’, being dubbed ‘N’, etc. This detail will not be important in this paper and I will keep using the quotations marks around ‘N’.
‘Man is a mammal’ is an example appearing in Hinzen (2016) where he claims that “all common nouns can occur without an overt determiner [somehow read as referential or kind-denoting]” (Hinzen, 2016, 593). I doubt that this is the case for all count nouns (and fail to find other examples). Kind-denoting interpretation still requires the count noun to appear as a plural, a definite or an indefinite (i.e., ‘(*Logician)/Logicians are smart’ ‘*(A) chair is used for sitting’, ‘*(The) potato originated in South America’) unless the count noun has a mass interpretation, i.e., `Lamb is tasty'.
See also Longobardi (1994, 633) for the claim that in Romance and Germanic languages the empty determiner with count nouns (that is, when count nouns appear bare) always selects the mass interpretation.
Recall what we said above: in prepositional phrases, count nouns may have an abstract or generic interpretation, certainly not one in which they denote a single individual in its extension e.g., in ‘after school’, ‘school’ makes a general contribution, not one related to a specific school.
Assumption that, as we saw in Sect. 3, is necessary in order to explain that proper names can appear bare in argument position.
Note that sentences containing definite descriptions can be incompletely interpreted in the same way, i.e., ‘The book is green’ would lack truth-value until reference is fixed on an individual book.
The argument applies to both versions of Predicativism: Segal pointed out that since both ‘that’ and ‘the’ can appear overtly with names in some occasions, predicativists should provide the rules governing when the determiner can appear on the surface and when it can be dropped (Segal, 2001, 561).
Indeed, situations where there is really a single satisfier of the complement noun do not warrant the use of demonstratives e.g., ‘that sun is shining’; ‘don’t look at that sun’; ‘that sun is the centre of the solar system’ (unless you mean aspects, or time-slices, or representations, etc., of the sun). With respect to proper names, although most names have multiple bearers, of course there may be names that have only one. In this case it seems odd that they are always used with a demonstrative when bare in argument position, even if the demonstrative is implicit.
Let me press on the fact that this was the proposal from the quote above: “It is this conventional reliance on extrasentential action or context to pick out a particular which signals the demonstrative element in both sentences” (Burge, 1973, 432, my emphasis).
A referee for this paper pointed out that is possible for the predicativist to reply that the implicit demonstrative must be pronounced in contexts in which there is more than one salient N, because ‘that’ must be stressed in such contexts. While I don’t deny that there are some complicated or confusing contexts where even emphatic pointing doesn’t clarify the intended referent of a demonstrative, I don’t think that a context in which there is more than one salient N (or more than one salient satisfier of the noun complement) is generally a context in which ‘that’ must be stressed. These contexts seem in fact to be the normal contexts for using demonstratives rather than, for example, incomplete descriptions: ‘I would like the cake’ doesn’t work in a context where there are three cakes to choose from, but ‘I would like that cake’ will be the choice because of the accompanying demonstration that it is arguably part of the mechanism by which demonstratives get to refer.
Matushansky (2006) claims that “the default is instantiated by languages that do have definite articles with proper names in argument positions” (Matushanky, 2006, 285); and throughout the paper she cites in particular Portuguese, Greek, dialects of German and Italian, as well as languages with preproprial articles (i.e., Catalan, Icelandic, Northem Norwegian and Tagalog among others). Fara mentions Portuguese, Modern Greek, French, German, Italian, and Spanish (Fara, 2015, fn21).
A small survey of a variety of languages will show that the combination of the definite article with proper names ranges from required in some languages (Catalan, Greek, Portuguese) to admissible but not required (versions of Spanish, Italian and German) or admissible only in certain contexts (Faroese and Icelandic) to not admissible (Afrikaans, Basque, Danish, English, French, Macedonian, Norwegian, Romanian, and Swedish and versions of Spanish, Italian and German). For more details see my (2011) and (2018).
For example, in some versions of Spanish, or in formal writing in Catalan, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish.
For illustration, consider an analogous case involving a mass term. In the sentence ‘The gold that was found was sold’ the term ‘gold’ is clearly functioning as a count noun; it appears with a restrictive clause and thus the definite article shows up. But this would not give us good reasons to suspect that the definite article is covertly attached to occurrences of ‘gold’ when it functions as a mass term (arguably functioning referentially), i.e., ‘Gold is a yellow metal’.
Perhaps referentialist would need a story about how names plus surnames or titles work, it is certainly an interesting issue. But nothing about referentialism entails that name + name (or even name + title) are compounds, so the problem does not arises for them. For example, a Mary Jane is called ‘Mary’ as much as is called ‘Jane’; there is no need that these names are meaning-related, or form a unit, or anything like that. They are independent so to speak (whereas a school bus is a bus but it is not a school; the first noun restricts the denotation of the second noun yielding a type of bus used for schools). The situation seems more like a collecting, as when you collect adjectives (a green and squared box it is both square and green).
Matushansky also mentions the behaviour of non-restrictive adjective with proper names in her (2006), but decides to set them aside on the basis of their complicated analysis (Matushansky, 2006, 290–292).
In these languages the use of the definite article with proper names varies regionally, or according to the context or wishes of the speaker, or according to whether they are used in formal or written form (cf. fn18. See my 2011 and 2018 for details.). But this variability is at odds with the idea that proper names are really definite descriptions.
I grant that one might individuate lexical items according to their lexical class, and thus there would be three different, albeit phonologically identical, lexical items ‘Jordan’. However, Matushansky herself uses phonological strings as the individuating criterion for a name (cf. 2006, 288 and 2008, 592–599) and thus it is not clear to me that ‘Jordan’, when it is just one phonological string, can be also different names (i.e., different lexical items). At worst, my argument shows that the m-merging proposal is in conflict with taking phonological strings as the individuating criterion for names.
I realize that there is a tricky issue regarding the individuation of languages and that I have been assuming here that there is just one determinate Italian language (or Spanish, or Catalan), and that there are determinate regional variations of Italian, Spanish or Catalan. But note that Matushansky does seem to assume the same when she formulates a rule for English or Italian. At any rate, even if languages are individuated differently, the cases discussed show that there might be languages for which m-merging would be difficult to articulate, and this cast doubts about its status as a grammatical rule. Also, Matushanky’s m-merging proposal would apply more restrictedly than what she might have envisioned.
The reader might wonder, however, whether referentialists would have a way to deal with the fact that the definite article is used with proper names in referential uses in some languages, and that this use is varied across languages ranging from obligatory to optional to ungrammatical. As I mentioned in Sect. 2, I believe that the definite article in these languages is an expletive. Since expletives don’t have semantic import, there is no pressure to provide a grammatical rule for when the article has to be present and when it does not. The explanation for the varied use of the definite article will probably be sociological rather than semantic.
Remember that this syntactic difference raise only on the conjecture that names are count nouns, and so on the assumption that there is no semantic difference between them.
For example, ‘The gold we had was sold’; ‘The two waters got mixed’; where ‘gold’ and ‘water’ can take the definite article or numerals.
Indeed, proper names are standardly considered as belonging to the general category noun, forming a subclass of their own, distinct from other subclasses—like count, mass, abstract, concrete, plural, etc.
Importantly, proper names are not exceptional with respect to its own subclass, or as referential terms. The referential use is consistent cross linguistically (i.e., there are no languages where names can’t be used referentially); it is consistent intra-linguistically (i.e., there are no contexts within a language where names cannot be used referentially (when they need to be used referentially, that is)); it is stable (i.e., there are no situations where one expects a referential use, but it turns out to be ungrammatical, or infelicitous; and also proper names don’t require a special set up to be used referentially). Regarding their semantic behaviour, there are no situations where referential uses that should denote individuals turn out to denote sets of individuals instead.
The expression here is ‘empty determiner’ because what is hypothesized is that it is the determiner position what is empty, not a particular determiner. Thus, a way to analyse ‘I had lamb’ would be ‘I had [DP ∅ [NP lamb]], with ‘I had some lamb’ being one way to interpret it (Hinzen, 2016, 593).
Adapted because the original example involved quantifiers (‘Lenny reads too much Heidegger and not enough Frege’, ‘Let’s go home and listen to some Bach’) but I wanted to highlight mass term uses where names appear bare, without other determiners.
Recall the examples from Sect. 2: at school, in place, etc., and ‘knowledge passes from teacher to student’.
Although there are possible cases with mass terms uses of names like those in (7), i.e., ‘You can’t jump from Kant to Frege in a single lecture’; these uses are marginal and crucially, the meaning of the name in these uses is not an abstract counterpart of the predicative meaning ‘being called ‘N’’, as it happens when count nouns are used as mass terms: their meaning is an abstract counterpart of their count noun meaning. Rather, these meanings seem to be derived from a referential meaning: N (as mass term): the body of works by N, or something of the sort.
Note that predicative names can generate generic sentences all right: `A Sarah is an individual with a short name’, `Sarahs are crazy’.
A more detailed argument regarding generic sentences and proper names can be found in Delgado (2018, ms).
The reader might wonder whether from the perspective of referentialism, names still present some exceptionality or quirkiness, since they are used as count nouns, but also used as mass terms, adjectives or verbs, etc. Names appear to be exceptional when converted to some other class: they seem to be less functional, more exceptional, o more demanding, indicating that perhaps these uses are coerced or, as I suggest below, the result of partial conversion. But the fact that they can be converted is not quirky at all, given that conversion is a very wide phenomenon involving virtually every open class in the language, and there are many other cases of partial conversion as well (cf. fn49). Indeed, as far as I have been able to attest, the level of productivity of converted names correlates with the level of productivity of conversion in general in a given language. Thus, it is expected that in a language like English where conversion is very common across most categories, proper names, being a kind of noun, also get involved in conversion – they would be quirky if they didn’t. Thanks to an anonymous referee for inviting me to clarify this point.
Schoubye recognizes this problem (Schoubye, 2017, fn34).
Jeshion raised this point particularly against Schoubye’s view, see Jeshion 2017, fn 12).
This phenomenon is often labelled as ‘functional shift’, ‘category extension’, ‘conversion’ or ‘zero-derivation’ (for some discussion see, Bauer (1983)). I chose a slightly different name for the phenomenon because I want to avoid theoretical associations with established views. I discuss this phenomenon and how it illuminates the behaviour of proper names in my (2011, 2018, 2019).
English adjectives converted to nouns are an example of partial conversion, where this means that converted words take some but not all of the properties of the category they change into, and may also keep some properties of their original category. For example, adjectives converted to nouns would take the definite article, as only nouns do, but some, i.e., ‘sick’, ‘poor’, ‘wealthy’, ‘wise’, ‘blind’, etc.; would not follow the rest of noun inflections, namely, they would take neither the indefinite article nor the plural form (i.e.,‘*a sick’, ‘*a wise’, ‘*poors’, ‘*wealthies’). Also, like ordinary nouns, adjectives converted to nouns can be modified by an attributive adjective (as only nouns do), i.e., ‘the unfortunate sick’, ‘the brave British’; but also have the following properties, unlike nouns: can be modified by an adverb i.e., ‘the extremely wealthy’ ‘the badly wounded’; can take comparative and superlative forms, i.e., ‘the poorest’; and are gradable, i.e., ‘the absolutely blind’, ‘the very old’ (all properties of adjectives) See Bauer (2005) for discussion.
Schoubye’s tentative answer is similar (2017, fn34), but it is still in conflict with the view that names are lexicalized as predicates. I believe Schoubye should either adopt my view and say that conversion for proper names into count nouns is partial or join Jeshion in accepting the grammaticality of the + N.
Think, for example, of the forms ‘the why’ or ‘the how’ as in ‘The why and how of effective altruism’. But these forms are hardly fully functional, e.g., it seems that one wouldn’t normally say ‘?I want to know the why’, or ‘?The book doesn’t explain the how’. To give a further example, the sentence ‘I will exit you from this room’ will probably be judged ungrammatical, since it makes an intransitive verb into a transitive one. However, the form could arise if the context is right. For example, this happens in Naples’s variant of Italian: it makes the intransitive verb uscire (to exit) into a transitive one.
There are other infelicities that predicativists are pressed to explain, but that are not problematic if conversion for proper names is partial. One is that people, while accepting predicative uses of proper names, often find them less than optimal, perhaps a bit odd or informal; and would choose a form like ‘people called ‘N’’ on occasions. Another: in Spanish, I would probably never use the plural of certain names because they sound awful to my ears even when common nouns with the same form sound fine (e.g., ‘Carloses, ‘Belenes’, ‘Anabeles’, contrasted with ‘dioses’ (gods), ‘vaivenes’ (sways), ‘decibeles’ (decibels). But it is odd that on occasions speakers do not feel comfortable using what is supposed to be the fundamental form of proper names.
Indeed, in many languages (including Basque, Danish, Faroese, French, Hindi, Italian, Mandarin Chinese, Norwegian, Romanian, Swedish and Tamil) proper names do not take the full range of determiners or plural form. See Delgado (2018) for extensive discussion.
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Acknowledgements
An earlier version of substantial part of this paper was already present in my BPhil thesis “Between Singularity and Generality: The Semantic Life of Proper Names” (University of Oxford 2011). Thanks to Ofra Magidor for guidance at that early stage. I’m especially indebted to Manuel García-Carpintero for invaluable comments and discussion at different stages in the development of the present form of this paper. I would also like to thank Robin Jeshion, Genoveva Martí, Kathrin Glüer-Pagin, Elia Zardini, and two anonymous referees for comments and discussion that helped me to improve this paper significantly. An early version of the paper was presented in 2016 at the Veritas Research Seminar (Yonsei University) and I am grateful to this audience for comments and discussion. I’m also very grateful to all the informants who shared their knowledge of their native languages with me. At different stages during the development of this paper I have benefitted from an AHRC Postgraduate Studentship Award; from a Doctoral Award from the programme of grants to new researchers (FI-DGR) of the Catalonian Government; and from an Junior Research Fellowship from the Portuguese national funding agency for science, research and technology (FCT).
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Delgado, L. Names vs nouns. Philos Stud 179, 3233–3258 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-022-01826-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-022-01826-1