Roots, naming, and locality: The structure of name predicates
Samuel Jambrović
November 2024 

Two phenomena have yet to be considered in the syntactic literature on names. First, names inflect differently than nouns that have the same root, as illustrated by Childs versus children (Kim et al. 1994). Second, any content that may be associated with the root or form of a name need not be true of its bearer (Mill 1843). Inspired by Burge (1973) and the semantic theory of predicativism, this paper argues that names, like nouns, are property-denoting expressions. Name predicates are proposed to minimally consist of two nominalizers, one that generates the name as a phonological string and another that converts this phonological string into a predicate. The source of regularization is the second cyclic layer, which disrupts locality between the root and any higher functional projections. Independent evidence for two nominalizers is found in languages like Spanish where names come in morphologically related pairs, such as Fernando and Fernanda. The first nominalizer differentiates names that share a root, and the second nominalizer hosts the gender feature that reflects the identity of the referent, capturing the fact that any individual can bear any name.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/006810 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Proceedings of the 39th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics
keywords:	names, roots, gender, number, case, determiners, distributed morphology, irregular morphology, regularization, predicativism, reference, morphology, semantics, syntax
previous versions:	v2 [October 2023] v1 [June 2021]
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