Properhood of human unique nouns in Romance languages

Abstract

This paper provides evidence that human unique nouns such as king constitute a peripheral group of lexemes within the word class of common nouns. In semantic definite contexts, they semantically resemble proper names with respect to monorefentiality and can therefore morphosyntactically behave like personal names. The properhood of inherently unique nouns has remained elusive in reference grammars and historical grammars of Romance languages. Different lines of diachronic and synchronic evidence support the properhood of human unique nouns: Differential object marking in Old Spanish, Old Portuguese, and Sicilian, possessive constructions in Old French, article-drop in unmodified prepositional phrases in Romanian, and proprial article in Old Romanian. By contrast, in Balearic Catalan, human and inanimate unique nouns morphosyntactically deviate both from proper names and non-unique nouns with respect to definite article forms. The findings reveal that properhood of human unique nouns is in line with an implicational scale based on the notion of dimensions of knowledge.