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

Tue Jun 25 12:03:59 UTC 2024

Dear Christian

Here are some helpful thoughts I pass on from Richard Coates, who’s not on Lingtyp; he writes very interestingly on names (place names, family names …).

I don't think day-names are proper. A major criterion for me is behaviour with indefinite markers. If I use a proper name with an indefinite article in English, it can only mean 'a member of the set of items bearing that name'. So you are a Greville and there is a London in Canada. (Skipping over complications like metaphorical usage - he's just a Putin, we'll build a new Jerusalem).

Day-names are different. We always used to meet on a Tuesday. They can be used in the plural - Fridays are best for me. And the meaning is in each case constant: the day between x-1 and x+1, or the xth day of the week. I think John Lyons placed them, like months, in the sense-category cyclic.

So fundamentally I agree with Christian.

Richard

Richard Coates

Bristol Centre for Linguistics

University of the West of England

Bristol BS16 1QY, UK.

Projects:

Survey of English Place-Names (BA/AHRC) http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/~aezins//survey/

Family Names of the United Kingdom (AHRC)

e: richard.coates at uwe.ac.uk<mailto:richard.coates at uwe.ac.uk>

w: http://www1.uwe.ac.uk/cahe/pdf.aspx?page=1101

Very best
Grev

On 25 Jun 2024, at 11:35, Mark Van de Velde via Lingtyp <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org> wrote:

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):

[cid:34879dea-c387-4c20-8f07-f4cebb2fbad6 at eurprd06.prod.outlook.com]

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?
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