Theory and Typology of Proper Names
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Theory and Typology of Proper Names Willy Van Langendonck Mouton de Gruyter Theory and Typology of Proper Names ≥ Trends in Linguistics Studies and Monographs 168 Editors Walter Bisang (main editor for this volume) Hans Henrich Hock Werner Winter Mouton de Gruyter Berlin · New York Theory and Typology of Proper Names by Willy Van Langendonck Mouton de Gruyter Berlin · New York Mouton de Gruyter (formerly Mouton, The Hague) is a Division of Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin. Țȍ Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines of the ANSI to ensure permanence and durability. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Langendonck, Willy van. Theory and typology of proper names / by Willy Van Langendonck. p. cm. Ϫ (Trends in linguistics. Studies and monographs ; 168) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-3-11-019086-1 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Names. 2. Semantics. 3. Pragmatics. 4. Grammar, Com- parative and general Ϫ Syntax. 5. Typology (Linguistics) I. Title. P323.L36 2007 410Ϫdc22 2006034592 ISBN 978-3-11-019086-1 ISSN 1861-4302 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. ” Copyright 2007 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechan- ical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, with- out permission in writing from the publisher. Cover design: Christopher Schneider, Berlin. Printed in Germany. Suddenly Sophie said, 'Have you ever wondered why we are alive, Mom?' 'Oh, not again!' 'Yes, because now I know the answer. People live on this planet so that someone can go around giving names to everything. ' Jostein Gaarder, Sophie's World, 100 To the memory ofDetty Leys Foreword This book is not just a synthesis of previous work but provides a number of insights and claims that are either entirely new or result from substantially reworked and extended existing papers of mine in such a way that the con tent of this publication hopefully constitutes a consistent and coherent piece of work. I would also like to mention that this work has interdiscipli nary traits in that not only language philosophical but also psycho- and neurolinguistic studies have been made use of. In addition, dialinguistic, i.e. diatopic, diachronic and sociolinguistic (socio-onomastic) insights have been provided. Only the database of proper names has remained roughly the same as before. Especially, the material used in the fourth chapter does not come only from my own research but also from work done by students from the Institute for Onomastics and Dialectology (University of Leuven) who made their licentiate dissertation under my supervision. I wish to thank here all the people who have encouraged me in this painstaking enterprise or read previous versions of one or more chapters. Special thanks go to Zofia Kaleta, who gave me not only constant encour agement but also some relevant advice, especially concerning Polish data. Mark Van de Velde provided me with interesting data from Bantu lan guages. With him I had many discussions on morphosyntactic characteris tics of proper names in these languages, especially Eton. Concerning the important first chapter it was rewarding to discuss pragmatic and other aspects of names with Richard Coates, and cognitive linguistic ideas with Dylan Glynn. From Dylan, I received interesting advice regarding English language, grammar and spelling. For more general assistance, I am deeply indebted to Kristin Davidse, who not only corrected my English, but provided me with thoroughgoing comments concerning earlier versions of every chapter in this book. I also thank Bill McGregor, Liesbet Heyvaert, and the other members of the re search group of the English language at the University of Leuven, for their valuable remarks on an earlier version of the first three chapters. Finally, I am grateful to Jan Goossens and Jean-Christophe Verstraete, who were willing to go through an earlier version of the fourth (dialinguistic) chapter. As a linguist, I am hoping that the present work will not only be of in terest for onomasticians but also for philosophers of language, psycho- and viii Foreword neurolinguists, and especially 'ordinary' linguists, semanticists and gram marians alike. All too often, the study of proper names has remained un derdeveloped in linguistic circles and publications, and is mostly entirely lacking in introductory textbooks of linguistics. As a textbook for advanced students in linguistics and onomastics, the present study intends to fill a gap in the study of proper names in these disciplines, especially in the English speaking world, where no linguistic book has been published on the theory of proper names since John Algeo's 1973 stratificational account. Partly, the neglect of the theoretical study of proper names may be due to the pes simistic view that a theory of names is hardly possible (Algeo 1985), or that a proper name may not be a linguistic sign (Christoph 1985) or not a struc tural notion (Coates 2006). Lass (1973: 395) even contends that the syntac tic and semantic representations of names "are probably null" (cf. Anderson 2003: 356). I hope to show in this book that this linguistic or grammatical abdication is unwarranted. Contents General introduction ................................................................ 1 Chapter 1: Nominal and referential-semantic status of proper names ..................................................................................... 6 1. Introduction .............................................................................................. 6 1.1. Proper names and propria 1 lemmas ..................................................... 7 1.2. The so-called pragmatic viewpoint.. ................................................... 9 1.3. Proper names as a semantic-syntactic class ...................................... 11 1.4. Radical Construction Grammar.. ...................................................... 13 1.5. Coseriu and Willems ........................................................................ 14 1.6. Dictionary lemmas ............................................................................ 15 2. The nominal status of proper names ....................................................... 17 2.1. The proper name as a nominal category ........................................... 17 2.2. Proper names and appellatives ......................................................... 19 3. The referential and semantic status of proper names .............................. 20 3.1. Some basic semantic notions applied in this work ........................... 20 3.2. Evaluation of the main views on the referential and semantic status of proper names ................................................ 22 3.2.1. Language philosophical views: from Mill to Kripke ................... 24 3.2.1.1. John Stuart Mill ...................................................................... 24 3.2.1.2. Gottlob Frege ......................................................................... 27 3.2.1.3. Edmund Husserl ..................................................................... 28 3.2.1.4. Bertrand Russell ..................................................................... 29 3.2.1.5. Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Searle .................................... 30 3.2.1.6. Saul Kripke and Keith Donnellan .......................................... 33 3.2.2. Some current linguistic theories of proper names ...................... 38 3.2.2.1. The maximum meaningfulness thesis ..................................... 39 3.2.2.2. Metalinguistic theories of proper names ................................ 39 3.2.2.3. Cognitive linguistic theories of proper names ....................... 50 3.2.2.4. The set theoretic cognitivist approach ................................... 58 3.2.2.5. The pragmatic view ................................................................ 65 3.3. Presuppositional meanings that proper names have or can have ...... 71 3.3.1. The thesis of the categorical presupposition in proper names .... 71 3.3.2. Categorical meanings as basic level concepts ............................ 79 3.3.3. Associative meaning pertains to the referent and to the name X Contents form on the level of usage ............................................................ 81 3.3.4. Emotive meaning: augmentative and diminutive ........................ 83 3.3.5. Grammatical meaning ................................................................. 84 4. Towards a more precise characterization and definition of proper names and propriallemmas ........................................................ 84 4.1. Towards a more precise characterization of proper names .............. 84 4.1.1. Do proper names have meaning? ................................................ 84 4.1.2. In what way do proper names refer? ........................................... 86 4.1.3. Towards a definition and a unified account of proper names ..... 86 4.1.3.1. The pragmatic component.. .................................................... 87 4.1.3.2. The semantic component... ..................................................... 90 4.1.3.3. The syntactic