volume: 5 (2002)
pages: 77–94
author: Lajos Marosán
title: Conversion or alternate class membership? Comments on Brøndal’s theory of proper noun
abstract: In the following pages I will be reviewing Brøndal’s (1948) theory of the proper noun, more specifically, I will discuss some problems concerning what is usually treated in traditional grammars under the heading “reclassification of proper nouns (PN) as common nouns (CN).” Brøndal’s views on word classes, in general, are very intriguing and also extremely thought provoking as well as fairly idiosyncratic and obscure in some respect; at first sight, however, some of his views seem counterintuitive or simply absurd. I will also examine Curme’s (1935), John Stuart Mill’s (1949), Jespersen’s (1924/1992) and Langacker’s (1991) view on the proper noun, concentrating on how they analyse and comment on cases which are usually treated as PN → CN conversions. In various grammars there is a section which is devoted to the analysis of structures in which the name of a well-known person is not used to refer to the person himself but denotes some quality or characteristic associated with that person. Such occurrences of the proper name are analysed in these grammars as reclassification, or use, of the proper noun as common noun.
In the following sections I wish to examine and comment on this claim suggesting that the traditional subcategorisation of the noun class into proper nouns and common nouns is untenable since the semantic properties of nouns do not parallel their syntactic and/or morphological characteristics, and grammar can only manipulate syntactic information.
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