When a name is stored in a data base, each piece needs to be handled separately. Each segment is called a name piece. There are many different kinds of name pieces. In some cultures society requires people to carry a relatively unique name given at birth. In other cultures the given name is not any more unique than the day of the week on which the child is born. It is quite common for there to be a set of given names customarily given to girls and another given to boys. In cases where given names are less distinctive, there are usually other names, such as the family name or the clan and tribal name, that will help to identify a person more nearly uniquely.
The set of feminine given names is an example of a classification based on semantics. This is because society assigns such names only to females. The assignment of a name according to the day of week of the child’s birthday is another such example. The fact that individuals have given names and surnames, however, involves a classification that has much less to do with semantics and more to do with what in English is called the part of speech. Linguists use a grammar to express classification. They characterize parts of speech and semantic features by using two kinds of rules in their grammar. There are two places in the grammar where these two degrees of classification appear. The appropriate place to describe the former classes that involve almost exclusively considerations of meaning is in the segment structure rules. The latter kind of classes, those that involve more general characteristics of presence or ordering relative to each other, are described in phrase structure rules.
The next paragraphs illustrate some of these descriptive apparatus.