Abstract
This article treats problems which have long been subject to debate : do proper names have meanings ? Are they linguistic signs ? In an attempt to offer a response, a model is presented concerning the meaning of proper names, utilizing the Saussurian dichotomy parole I langue . This model distinguishes two categories of meaning and proposes that all proper names originally had a meaning and that some (still or do) have meaning or traces thereof. With respect to the second problem, the Saussurian definition of the linguistic sign is introduced. While the meanings of common nouns are accounted for by the signified (concept), this cannot be true of proper names because not all have (or no longer have) meanings. The second part of the article introduces the corpus of Selk'nam names.
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