Article published In:
From Culture to Language and Back: The Animacy Hierarchy in language and discourseEdited by Laure Gardelle and Sandrine Sorlin
[International Journal of Language and Culture 5:2] 2018
► pp. 184–202
Edited by Laure Gardelle and Sandrine Sorlin
[International Journal of Language and Culture 5:2] 2018
► pp. 184–202
French anthroponyms as a heterogeneous category
Is there such a thing as personal nouns?
In natural languages, personal nouns (e.g., madame, ministre) are used very frequently and it is usually not very difficult to identify and interpret them in texts. If one tries to define them more precisely, however, one is confronted with a series of challenges. This contribution gives an overview of several types of difficulties that can be observed when trying to establish distinctions between personal nouns and other words. They are related to lexical differences between (personal) nouns and (personal) names, the referential boundaries of humanness, some morphological and semantic properties of French personal names, their syntactic behavior as personal nouns in French as well as the types of predications that may be used in order to distinguish between personal noun use and other uses.
Keywords: French language, lexicology, personal nouns, personal names, categorization
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.General remarks about French personal nouns and the data collection
- Categorization of personal nouns
- Data collection
- 3.Nouns and names
- 4.Reference
- Referents that are not yet/or no longer human
- Referents that belong to fictional and/or religious domains
- Referents that are humans vs referents that are legal entities
- 5.Morphology
- Multiword expressions
- 6.Polysemy and Homonymy
- 7.Collective Nouns
- 8.Syntax
- 9.Predication
- 10.Conclusion
- Notes
-
References
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Cited by (2)
Cited by two other publications
Balnat, Vincent
2023. Madame Machin et Herr Dingsda : les anthroponymes indéfinis en français et en allemand. Langages N° 232:4 ► pp. 9 ff. 
Zenner, Eline, Lisa Hilte, Ad Backus & Reinhild Vandekerckhove
2023. On sisters and zussen: integrating semasiological and onomasiological perspectives on the use of English person-reference nouns in Belgian-Dutch teenage chat messages. Folia Linguistica 57:2 ► pp. 449 ff.
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