Article published in:
From Culture to Language and Back: The Animacy Hierarchy in language and discourse
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?

| University of Geneva

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. [1] 1

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
Published online: 28 June 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijolc.00006.elm
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