A proposal for a multilevel linguistic representation of Spanish personal names

This paper proposes a multilevel representation of personal names, with the aim of offering an economical treatment for these expressions, which makes a clear distinction between ontological information, described in a name database, and linguistic levels of representation. Adopting the linguistic model and formalisms provided within the MeaningóText framework (Mel’čuk 1988), it is argued that, contrary to other proper names (e.g. organizations, toponyms, etc.), which should be treated similarly to idioms, complex personal names such as José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero should not be represented as single units at any linguistic level nor in the lexicon. Variant forms referring to a concrete person (e.g. José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, Rodríguez Zapatero, Zapatero, Z.P.) are accounted for by a set of rules connecting the name database and the semantic level.