@@ -37,7 +37,7 @@ In this latter case, knowing the defining characteristics of the concept enables
This distinction between entity name and instantiable concept name is reminiscent of the proper noun versus common noun distinction, but this latter distinction is not so easy to define precisely. Of course, lexical items that are exclusively used for directly naming entities (e.g. the first and last names for people) are easily classified as proper nouns (sometimes called **pure proper nouns**). This is why Erhmann (2008) roughly defines proper nouns as the "désignation d’une entité précise par le biais d’une description dont le sens joue un rôle mineur par rapport à la dénomination, opérant directement, du référent" (the designation of a precise entity via a description whose meaning plays a minor role with respect to the denomination of the referent, which operates directly").
But an abundant litterature shows that the proper / common noun distinction reveals difficult to characterize in linguistic terms (we refer primarily to (Kleiber, 2001;2007) and (Erhmann, 2008) for a state of the art). Indeed within names of specific entities, we can distinguish:
-**(1a)** entity names composed of lexical items that are dedicated to naming entities (pure proper nouns), such as *Italy*, *Anna Duval*, *Microsoft*
-**(1b)** entity names that have a descriptive basis, such as the "International League against Racism and Anti-Semitism" or the "Massif central" (litterally the "central massif"): the naming convention between the entity and the name is sociologically typical of a proper noun (the name of an association, of a geographical item), but also clearly results from the compatibility of the entity characteristics and the meaning of the lexical items
-**(1b)** entity names that have a descriptive basis, such as the *International League against Racism and Anti-Semitism* or the *Massif central* (litterally the *central massif*): the naming convention between the entity and the name is sociologically typical of a proper noun (the name of an association, of a geographical item), but also clearly results from the compatibility of the entity characteristics and the meaning of the lexical items
-**(1c)** but also names which serve to designate unique abstract entities, such as abstract simple nouns (*taxidermy*) or abstract MWEs (*Euclidean geometry*, *machine translation*): because of the unicity of the entity that can be called that way, they too can be viewed as entity names, for which the speakers have to learn the naming convention.
Now the thing is that cases (1d) are traditionnally not viewed as proper nouns. Kleiber (1996) argues that proper nouns function to name a particular entity within a specified class (a particular person within the class of persons).
