Abstract: Treatment of the meaning of names by linguists is very much influenced by work in philosophy, with some of them adopting sometimes rather crude forms of descriptivism (Jespersen, Sørensen), and others adopting Mill's view. Important distinctions among the functions of names have been established with work (by Lyons and others) on vocatives and nomination. Most grammarians have maintained the position that names are a sub-type of noun, while some (e.g., Gary-Prieur) have asserted that their distributions cannot be distinguished. However, this is based on regarding every occurrence of a name form as being categorially a name rather than a derived noun. Opposed to this is the view (J. M. Anderson) that names belong to a functional category shared with (other) determinatives (pronouns and determiners), which also introduces difficulties (e.g., in Greek). There has also been much work on classes of name and the derivational relationships between names and other categories.

Keywords: vocatives, nomination, names as nouns, names as determinatives, name-classes, derivational morphology,