Words like William, London and Snowdon are usually held to be nouns. What is the justification for this? In distribution they are not exactly like common nouns since we cannot normally use determiners with them: a London, this William, etc. Moreover, proper nouns do not have a denotation; that is, there is no class of objects in the world that we distinguish as williams or londons such that, when we want to refer to one of them, we can construct an expression to indicate which one we are talking about. Proper nouns just do not function in this way; they work by being the name for a given individual. This point is brought home to us when there is more than one person present who is called by the same name. In such circumstances we are conscious that calling by name does not work. We might then convert a proper noun for the occasion to a common noun and say this William, your William, the William I know, another William, three Williams, etc. In that case, William is a common noun denoting the class of human beings whose name is William. Alternatively we might introduce more names into the circle of people by calling one of them Bill, another Will, and so on. The fact that there are not enough different names to go round among the individuals that we need to refer to does not in the least affect the fact that referring to people (and places, etc.) by name and referring to them by means of expressions constructed out of common nouns are quite different ways of referring. What justifies our regarding proper nouns as nouns is that: 1 they can take the genitive inflection— William’s chair; America’s coastline, etc.; 2 they can occur in more or less the same range of combinations with other expressions as can noun phrases—e.g. after prepositions, beside William, of America, to Edinburgh—and in place of the noun phrases shown in Figure 10; 3 they are used for referring to people, animals, places, and so on. It is of interest to note that not only are proper
nouns sometimes redeployed as common nouns (e.g. this William), but that common nouns are sometimes used as proper nouns, as in Doctor will be here in a minute. We can tell that the word doctor is being used as a proper noun in this sentence because, as a common noun it would be countable and would need a determiner before it: The doctor will be here in a minute, or A doctor
will be here in a minute, etc.