From Proper Nouns to Proper Nominals: Morphosyntactic Evidence from English and Uzbek

What makes a proper name a proper name? Standard grammars answer with two criteria: it is a noun, and it bears a capital letter. Yet proper names in authentic corpora routinely take the form of abbreviations (BBC), blends (Brexit), hashtags (#brexitshambles), and clause-length titles — none of which fits the "noun-plus-capital" formula. This article argues that these anomalies dissolve once proper names are analysed as proper nominals — sub-phrasal units that target the intermediate level between the bare noun and the full noun phrase. Drawing on a reanalysis of 187 English proper nominal tokens from Brexit-era discourse and a comparative dataset of 43 Uzbek anthroponym tokens, we identify three formal delimitation mechanisms — typographic, morphological, and syntactic — and demonstrate that all three systematically converge on the nominal level rather than the word or phrase level. A cross-linguistic comparison with Uzbek reveals that the nominal level hypothesis holds in a language without articles, where case suffixes attach directly to the proper nominal, confirming that the nominal is a language-universal structural target rather than an English-specific artefact. The analysis critically extends Philippe's (2023) framework by providing explicit formal diagnostics that resolve the circularity risk in purely functional definitions of the proper name.

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