The real Billy the Kid: Two articles in a single English proper name

Abstract

ABSTRACT The paper investigates the rare case where a single English proper name is used with two articles, e.g. the real Billy the Kid. The article placed to the right of the personal name, i.e. Billy, is called the inner article, while the article located to the left of the personal name is termed the outer article. The usage of the inner article is first explored against the historical record, and it is demonstrated that it remains robust wherever the use of modern surnames has not yet taken hold, e.g. in regnal names, nicknames, names of cartoon characters, etc. It is shown that proper names requiring the use of the inner article carry identifying information that is needed to ensure that they refer uniquely and that such information is encoded in embedded NPs, which motivates the use of the article and explains why it is placed inside the linear order of proper name constituents. The outer article is shown to mark the (in)definiteness of a referent manifestation/spatial-temporal slice created by modifying a proper name. In double article cases like the real Billy the Kid the inner article and outer articles mark thus the (in)definiteness of two different linguistic entities: the proper name itself (the inner article) and its spatial-temporal slice (the outer article). Consequently, the former is always definite while the latter can be either definite or indefinite.