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Proper names used as modifiers: a comprehensive functional analysis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 January 2017

TINE BREBAN
TINE BREBAN*
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics and English Language, The University of Manchester, Samuel Alexander Building, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, United Kingdomtine.breban@manchester.ac.uk
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Abstract

My central concern is the special use of proper names in the English noun phrase first discussed by Rosenbach (2006, 2007, 2010; Koptjevskaja-Tamm & Rosenbach 2005): proper names which are used as modifiers with an identifying function, e.g. theBushadministration (‘Which administration does the noun phrase refer to? The one headed by Bush’). On the basis of a corpus study, I argue that existing analyses of Rosenbach (2007) and Schlücker (2013) fail to account for all cases; they also fail to capture the seemingly contradictory syntactic and functional properties of these proper names in a unified way. My alternative analysis is framed within Halliday's (1994) functional model of the English noun phrase, but radically thinks beyond the typical association of functions with word classes (see also Rijkhoff 2009). My proposal is that the majority of these proper names can be analysed as epithets, a function typically associated with adjectival modifiers such as theredcar. A smaller set, proper name modifiers such as aKerrysupporter, are analysed as complements (Payne & Huddleston 2002). I end by discussing the implications of this dual analysis for another open question, whether proper name modifiers are morphosyntactically phrasal modifiers or part of compounds.

Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 22 , Issue 3 , November 2018 , pp. 381 - 401
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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Footnotes

1I'm very grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive input, which helped flesh out and sharpen up the argumentation. I would also like to thank my colleagues Julia Kolkmann and John Payne for our valuable discussion of the semantic/pramatics of proper name modifiers. I am further indebted to the audiences at ICAME26, IPRA14, the KULeuven FunC colloquium and especially at the Workshop on Proper Names and Morphosyntax organized at the Freie Universität Berlin in November 2015. Finally, I'd like to thank Bernd Kortmann for being a helpful and patient editor.

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