[Lingtyp] [Spam:] nouns denoting months and days of the week

[Mark Van de Velde]

Dear Christian:

Names of months are discussed clearly and extensively in Willy Van 
Langendonck's /Theory and Typology of Proper Names/ (2007, Mouton de 
Gruyter). Van Langendonck crucially distinguishes between proper names 
and proprial lemmas (= lexical items typically used as proper names). He 
defines proper names as follows (2007:88):

The semantic and pragmatic parts of his definition are universal, but 
the formal part is more language-specific. Therefore a further 
distinction between the universal category of proper names and 
language-specific word classes of Proper Names is useful.

The criterion of ability to appear in close appositional constructions 
works well for Indo-European languages. It is naturally applied to names 
of months (/the month of June/), but not to /morning/ or /midnight/ 
(??/the time of the day morning/).

Van Langendonck (2007: 225-232) provides a detailed discussion of 
different kinds of temporal names, which also discusses the names of the 
days of the week. From a semantic-pragmatic point of view, they are 
proper names, as they denote unique entities in the basic level category 
/day/. When used as proper names, they do not take an article, as is 
typical for Proper Names in English. In contrast, they can't be used is 
close appositional constructions like /?the day Monday/. This may have a 
simple formal explanation in the presence of the noun for the basic 
level category term /day /in the day names themselves, but it could also 
suggest that names of days are less typical proper names than names of 
months, and that therefore they have fewer of the formal characteristics 
of English Proper Names.

I attach a short paper on names in the Bantu language Kirundi where Van 
Langendonck's approach is applied, with the additional distinction 
between the universal category of proper names and the language specific 
notion of Proper Names. Names of months are discussed too. (Van de 
Velde, Mark (2009). Agreement as a grammatical criterion for proper name 
status in Kirundi. In: /Onoma/ 44: 219-241. (written in 2011, appeared 
in January 2012)).

All the best,

Mark

On 25/06/2024 09:13, Christian Lehmann via Lingtyp wrote:
> If one searches the web with the question "Are nouns denoting days of 
> the week proper names?", some pages know that the answer is 'yes'. 
> However, their argument is circular: Since English orthography 
> requires the capitalization of such nouns, they are categorized as 
> proper names; and since they are proper names, they are to be capitalized.
>
> I use the following definitions: A common noun is a noun which 
> designates an entity by subsuming it under a notion. A proper noun or 
> name is a noun that refers to an entity without subsuming it under a 
> notion. Consequently, a common noun can be defined; a proper noun 
> cannot (over and beyond the onomastic category that it belongs to, 
> like anthroponym or toponym).
>
> Now an entity like Tuesday can easily be defined as the second day of 
> the week; and likewise an entity like February. By this criterion, 
> such entities appear to be notions, and the nouns designating them 
> consequently common nouns.
>
> If such nouns are proper nouns, then why are nouns like /midnight/ and 
> /morning/ not?
>
> What do the semanticists say? And are there structural/distributional 
> properties distinguishing proper and common nouns which decide the 
> alternative for designations of months and days? Are there nouns 
> taking an intermediate position between common and proper?
> -- 
>
> Prof. em. Dr. Christian Lehmann
> Rudolfstr. 4
> 99092 Erfurt
> Deutschland
>
> Tel.: 	+49/361/2113417
> E-Post: 	christianw_lehmann at arcor.de
> Web: 	https://www.christianlehmann.eu
>
>
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-- 
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LLACAN 	
	Mark Van de Velde
Directeur du LLACAN (CNRS-INaLCO)
mark.vandevelde.cnrs.fr <https://mark.vandevelde.cnrs.fr>
bantu.cnrs.fr <https://bantu.cnrs.fr>
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