PROPER NAMES Are proper names part of the

*PROPER NAMES *Are proper names part of the English lexicon? Should all words beginning with a capital letter be excluded from a vocabulary count of the language? One answer is hidden within a piece of old music-hall repartee:

-I say, I say. I can speak French. -You can speak French? I didn’t know that, let me hear you speak French. -Paris, Calais, Jean-Paul Sartre, Charles de Gaulle. . .

*The audience laughs, which indicates that they sense an anomaly here. And indeed, there is an intuitive difference between such words as table and sleep, on the one hand, and Paris and Sartre, on the other. We do not usually count the latter as true vocabulary.

There is a sense in which they are part of the learning of a language. If French speakers learn English, they have to learn to replace Londres by London, and Greeks have to replace Joannis by John. There are rules of pronunciation which have to be followed, and rules of grammar which apply to proper names in a special way

*There are names which form part of the idiomatic history of an Englishspeaking community, such as Billy the Kid, The Times, William the Conqueror, The Mayflower, Phi Beta Kappa, and Woolworths. And there are names which have taken on an additional sense, such as Fleet Street (= ‘the British press’), The White House (= ‘the US government’), and Fido (= ‘any dog’), A general encyclopedia contains thousands of such cases.

*We have to conclude that English proper names are on the boundary of the lexicon. Some of them are so closely bound up with the way meaning is structured in the language that it would be difficult to exclude them from any super dictionary. They are felt to ‘belong’ to the language, and often have a language- specific form (e. g. Christmas, January, the Moon, the Falklands).

*Others are felt to be independent of English - or any other language - and would seem to be more at home in an encyclopedia (e. g. Alpha Centauri, Diplodocus, Helen Keller). Allowing in just a proper names, though, considerably has a more general increases the size of the lexicon.

* * Listed below are a number of places which always begin with a capital letter, and would thus be considered to be proper names. Black Hole (of Calcutta) Broadway Dartmoor East End Fort Knox Greenwich Village Hyde Park Corner Iron Curtain Madison Avenue Mason-Dixon Line Mayfair Number 10 Pearl Harbor Scotland Yard Soho - Third World * West Bank (Middle East) * West End * Wrexham