1.2 Grammatical Analysis.   The so called common nouns in English are either countable (unit) nouns or uncountable (mass) nouns. Countable nouns have plurals and denote individual items; when they are singular they must be accompanied by a determiner and/or take modifiers denoting number: a book, many books, but *book alone is normally ungrammatical. Uncountable nouns have no plural and denote a kind of thing; they may be used without a determiner and they take modifiers denoting amount: furniture, less furniture, too much furniture, but not standard usage *a furniture or *many furnitures. Proper nouns oppose common nouns. They are peculiar in that they are typically used (as common nouns cannot be) in the singular without a determiner: George. Yet they are countable: ‘I know a George’ and ‘There are many Georges among my friends.’

Most words that are semantically proper nouns are also grammatically proper nouns, but some proper names (notably certain toponyms) must be used with a determiner (generally the) in the singular: ‘I live in the Hague, a city in the Netherlands’, not *‘I live in Hague, a city in Netherlands.’ Conversely, some grammatically proper nouns are not fullly proper names in the semantic sense. Tuesday is a proper noun because it is countable but can be used in the singular without a determiner: ‘There are five Tuesdays this month’ and ‘We will visit you on Tuesday.’ However, Tuesday can also be defined as the third day of the week; i.e., the word is defined by characteristics that its referents have relative to other things in the world, and not merely by the fact that they are called by the name Tuesday. So most semantically proper names are grammatically proper nouns and vice versa, but not all.

It would not be right to leave the topic of grammatical analysis without pointing out that different names make the distinction between semantic reference and grammatical form in different ways. A semantically proper name like George carries with it a traditionally grammatical feature of masculine. In other words there is a pool of given names in English that are defined grammatically by the semantic feature of sex on its common referents. Similarly there are grammatical differences in the names of certain features of the landscape that are being referred to. For example, Mount Washington, Cape Horn name the landscape feature first and then place a modifier on it afterward. The opposite is the case with Black Mountain, Pearl Harbor, where the modifier comes first. With regard to dates we would like to call attention to the fact that that there are many other designations like Tuesday. Consider the names of the seasons of the year, e.g., Summer, Winter; the months of the year, e.g., March, September; festivals on the ecclesiastical calendar, e.g., Christmas, Easter. Even the numbered days of each month are either common or proper. For example, “The bill is due on the seventh” makes it a common noun, “The baby was born on the seventh of June, 2005,” makes it a proper name semantically. Such entities have proper names that display grammatical features to a greater or lesser degree.