Questions tagged [proper-nouns]

This is something I was just thinking about. In English, we seem to rely mostly on articles to tell proper nouns and common nouns apart. Proper nouns are always singular, and lack an article. While common nouns can only lack an article in the…

This Google ngram compares the use of the phrases "in the Ukraine" and "in Ukraine" over time. A big change happened in the mid-1990s, when use of the definite article declined significantly. Use of the definite article in English is said to be…

In English, "sun" and "moon" are treated as common nouns. A sun and a moon are kinds of things, but the sky only happens to have one of each (at least in a pre-Copernican view), so they don't need names of their own. This is reflected in the fact…

I am mostly wondering if proper nouns exhibit distributional and/or morphological peculiarities that set them apart from pronouns from a broad typological perspective.