Introduction

What’s in a name? My answer: nothing special. Against common assumptions, I try to show that names do not have a special tie to the “object” they denote. In order to do this, I have to take a little detour to discuss the validity of speaking of “objects” in a linguistic context in the first place. After taking a decidedly non-realist stance, I continue to argue that proper names and common nouns do not belong to different categories, at least not to different semantic or syntactic categories. Rather, I hope to show that the syntactic and semantic differences between proper names and common nouns can be derived from the interplay of determiners and their nominal complements. The tendency of typical proper names to be used with particular semantic intentions and in particular syntactic environments that transport these semantic intentions, however, provides the basis for categorization. While proper names and common nouns are thus inherently indistinguishable, they nevertheless belong to pragmatically charged distinct categories. Since the categorial distinction is merely pragmatic, proper names and common nouns are not only interchangeable in many environments but also freely convertible into one another. While traditional views were forced to assume ‘type shift’ or other conversion mechanisms, I claim that free conversion is possible, because it really never happens: what already is the same does not need to be converted.

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