What makes a proper name a proper name? Standard grammars answer with two criteria: it is a noun, and it bears a capital letter. Yet proper names in authentic corpora routinely take the form of abbreviations (BBC), blends (Brexit), hashtags (#brexitshambles), and clause-length titles — none of which fits the "noun-plus-capital" formula. This article argues that these anomalies dissolve once proper names are analysed as proper nominals — sub-phrasal units that target the intermediate level between the bare noun and the full noun phrase. Drawing on a reanalysis of 187 English proper nominal tokens from Brexit-era discourse and a comparative dataset of 43 Uzbek anthroponym tokens, we identify three formal delimitation mechanisms — typographic, morphological, and syntactic — and demonstrate that all three systematically converge on the nominal level rather than the word or phrase level. A cross-linguistic comparison with Uzbek reveals that the nominal level hypothesis holds in a language without articles, where case suffixes attach directly to the proper nominal, confirming that the nominal is a language-universal structural target rather than an English-specific artefact. The analysis critically extends Philippe's (2023) framework by providing explicit formal diagnostics that resolve the circularity risk in purely functional definitions of the proper name.
From Proper Nouns to Proper Nominals: Morphosyntactic Evidence from English and Uzbek
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References
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