Proper Names and Linguistic Dynamics

Pragmatics is the study of how people exchange meanings through the use of language. In this paper we describe our experience with regard to texts belonging to a large contemporary corpus of written language, in order to verify the uses, changes and flexibility of the meaning of Proper Names (PN). As a matter of fact, while building the lexical semantic database ItalWordNet (IWN), a considerable set of PN (up to now, about 4,000) has been inserted and studied. We give prominence to the polysemy of PN and their shifting or moving from one class to another as an example of the extensibility of language and the possibility of change considering meaning as a dynamic process. Many examples of the sense shifting phenomenon can be evidenced by textual corpora. By comparing the percentages regarding the texts belonging to two different periods of time, an increasing use of the PN with sense extension has been verified. This evidence could confirm the tendency to consider the derived or extended senses as more salient and prevailing on the base senses, confirming a “gradual fixation” of meaning during the time. The object of our study (in progress) is to observe the uses of sense extensions also examining in detail “freshly coined” examples and taking into account their relationship with metarepresentational capacity and human creativity and the ways in which linguistic dynamics can activate the meaning potential of the words. 1. Lexicographic Experience According to Wittgenstein every sign seems dead when it appears by itself: only in use is it alive. Lexical pragmatics is a branch of linguistics that investigates the processes by which linguistically-specified (“literal”) word meanings are modified in use (Wilson, 2004). The goal of lexical pragmatics is to account for the fact that the concept communicated by use of a word often differs from the concept encoded. We wish to describe our experience relative to the texts belonging to a large contemporary corpus of written language, in order to verify the changes and flexibility of the meaning of Proper Names (PN). While building the lexical semantic database ItalWordNet (IWN), a considerable set of PN (up to now, about 4,000) has been inserted and studied. Each PN is considered as an “instance” of a class it belongs to, e.g.: “Firenze (Florence) belongs to class città (town)”. About 200 classes of PN were defined. While codifying PN, linking each proper name to its belonging class, it was evidenced that, in many cases, there is a shift from one belonging class to another, with an extension of meaning. In particular, we examine the particular uses of PN, highlighting polysemic productions that occur by means of a metaphoric use of PN, e.g.: “He is a poor Don Quixote”, or by means of metonymy, e.g.: “the Yamaha won out again with Valentino Rossi”, or on the basis of a kind of analogy, e.g.: “You have a beautiful silhouette”. We give prominence to the polysemy of PN and their shifting or moving from one class to another as an example of the extensibility of language and of the possibility of change that are at the basis of a functional approach considering meaning as a dynamic process. Some deviations from the literal reference are present regularly when considering some particular belonging classes; therefore a semantic relation has been created to codify this phenomenon in IWN (Marinelli, 2004). When there is a regular shifting from one belonging class to another, (in the case either of metonym or of metaphor), also for PN we indicate the regular shifting using the code: “has extension” and its reversed “is extension of”