Names as words

This chapter justifies the choice of Old English personal names for grammatical analysis. The view of names as nouns is rejected. Different syntactic distributions reflect different notional properties. Unlike common words, names lack the sense relations correlating with denotation. The chapter discusses alleged meanings of names and reassesses claims about their function: as individual identification, as purely referential, as classificatory. Information about a name which is lexical, in the form of secondary categories (‘person’ versus ‘place’, male versus female gender), and to be entered into an onomasticon, is distinguished from encyclopaedic information which a name may acquire. Departures from conventional gender assignment within a single onomasticon (e.g. Fido as the name of a female cat), notably via figurative acts, create variables which may become conventional. Such variables have the potential to effect language change.