Où il est montré que le nom propre n'est (presque) jamais « modifié »

Résumé 0

This paper shows that the term “modified Proper Name”, which comes from a particular logical theory (Burge), is not actually relevant to describe Proper Names from a linguistic point of vue. It is first pointed out that the use of this term is not clear, as we never know whether it reflects a syntactic or a semantic level of description. The main idea brought out is that the interpretation of a Proper Name within a sentence is regularly accounted for by combining the definition of that Proper Name in the lexicon with the meanings of the other constituants of the Noun Phrase. Denominative interpretations are a special type of constructions, because the combination with the indefinite article leads to delete the identification instruction in the definition of the Proper Name; the terms “modified Proper Name” could possibly be used, in a strictly semantic acception, to caracterize that special type of constructions.