The growing distance between proper names and common nouns in German: On the way to onymic schema constancy

Abstract

AbstractThe aim of this article is twofold. Firstly, it shows that the history of German proper name inflection is a story of profound change. Proper names started out being inflected like common nouns; later, the reduction of their inflectional endings eventually resulted in a distinct declension class of proper names. Furthermore, gender assignment in proper names is different from that of common nouns, and today proper names may be accompanied by classifiers that have evolved from the definite article. Additionally, proper names show particularities concerning their syntactical behavior, word-formation processes, and orthography. While (most of) these developments provide evidence for change, they can, at the same time, be functionally interpreted as strategies to preserve the name shape for reasons of recognition. A second aim of this article is therefore to show that, as proper names are specific linguistic units, they deserve specific treatment. Most of the changes serve to stabilize the “name body” (schema consistency) and to mark morphological boundaries.