On the Status of Proper Names in the Grammar

This paper is yet another contribution to the enormous theoretical headache that is the syntactic and semantic analysis of proper names. In particular, I provide a preliminary argument for the claim that proper names are always syntactically base-generated as functional items, as types of pronouns. I will do so by constructing a reductio ad absurdum argument against the opposing view, the view that proper names are generated as plain common nouns. The debate between the characterization of proper names as functional versus lexical developed here mirrors the debate in the area of analytical philosophy between the proponents of Descriptivism (championed most notably by Frege (1892) and Russell (1905), and most recently Geurts (1997) and Elbourne (2005)), who view names as disguised definite descriptions, and those who support the Causal Theory of proper names which claims that names have no inherent content (Donnellan, 1966, 1970; Kripke, 1972, 1979 among others). I will first briefly summarize these two influential views in philosophy, and then show how, given the commonly assumed distinction between lexical and functional items (Abney, 1987), these semantic theories will be translated into syntactic ones: the Frege-Russellian view claiming that names would be generated as lexical and the Kripkean view favouring a functional treatment. The bulk of this paper consists in arguing that, contrary to what studies in theoretical syntax seem to suggest (see, for example, Longobardi (1994); Chierchia (1998); Borer (2005a) inter alia), if proper names are base-generated as lexical items, i.e. items with descriptive content à la Frege-Russell, given the structure of the model we are working in (The Minimalist Program (Chomsky, 1995)/Antisymmetry (Kayne, 1994)), then we run into a contradiction. The lexical analysis of proper names having been shown to be untenable, we are left with the only possible analysis being one in which proper names are treated as content-less functional items, a characterization which clashes with a descriptivist view of names, but meshes perfectly well with a Causal Theoretic perspective.