Proper Names

Proper names are distinguished from proper nouns. A

proper noun is a word-level unit of the category noun,
while proper names are noun phrases (syntagms). For
instance, the proper name ‘Jessica Alba’ consists of
two proper nouns: ‘Jessica’ and ‘Alba’. Proper names
may consist of other parts of speech, too: ‘Brooklyn
Bridge’ contains the common noun ‘Bridge’ as well as
the proper noun ‘Brooklyn’. ‘The Raritan River’ also
includes the determiner ‘the’. ‘The Bronx’ combines a
determiner and a proper noun. Finally, ‘the Golden
Gate Bridge’ is a proper name with no proper nouns in
it at all. While any string of words (or non-words) can
be a proper name, we may (tentatively) locate that
liberality in the form of proper nouns. Proper names,
by contrast, simply have a large number of paradigms
corresponding to the sorts of things named (Carroll
1985). For instance, official names of persons in most
Western cultures consist of (at least) first and last
names (themselves proper nouns). Names of bridges
have an optional definite determiner and often
contain the common noun ‘bridge’. Hence we can
have bridge names that embed other proper names
like ‘The George Washington Bridge’.

A distinction is normally made in current linguistics

between proper nouns and proper names. By this
strict distinction, because the term noun is used for a
class of single words (tree, beauty), only single-word
proper names are proper nouns: Peter and Africa are
both proper names and proper nouns; but Peter the
Great and South Africa, while they are proper names,
are not proper nouns. The term common name is not
much used to contrast with proper name, but some
linguists have used the term for that purpose.
Sometimes proper names are called simply names;
but that term is often used more broadly.