The syntax of Puss in Boots and Sleeping Beauty: Proper names between productivity and atomicity

This paper explores the syntactic formation of proper names. Due to their syntactic productivity and internal complexity, work stemming from Longobardi (1994) has assumed that proper names are created in the syntax via N◦ -to-D◦ movement. However, these approaches leave unexplained a set of semantic and syntactic asymmetries between common and proper names. Our paper will highlight three: the DP Divergence Point, the Semantic Exocentricity of Proper DPs, and the Featural Inaccessibility of Proper DPs. Building on Longobardi (1994) and the split DP hypothesis (Aboh 2004; Haegeman 2004 et seq.), we suggest that proper names require intermediate movement to a lower projection: DeixP. N◦ -to-Deix◦ movement renders the NP as a whole an indexical.