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A proper noun (sometimes called a proper name, though the two terms normally have different meanings) is a noun that represents a unique entity (India, Pegasus, Jupiter, Confucius, Pequod) – as distinguished from common nouns (or appellative nouns), which describe a class of entities (country, animal, planet, person, ship). [11]
A proper noun is a noun that identifies a single entity and is used to refer to that entity (Africa; Jupiter; Sarah; Walmart) as distinguished from a common noun, which is a noun that refers to a class of entities (continent, planet, person, corporation) and may be used when referring to instances of a specific class (a continent, another planet, these persons, our corporation).
Thus, Zealand, for example, is a proper noun, but New Zealand, though a proper name, is not a proper noun. [4] Unlike some common nouns, proper nouns do not typically show number contrast in English. Most proper nouns in English are singular and lack a plural form, though some may instead be plural and lack a singular form.
Nouns are also created by converting verbs and adjectives, as with the words talk and reading (a boring talk, the assigned reading). Nouns are sometimes classified semantically (by their meanings) as proper and common nouns (Cyrus, China vs frog, milk) or as concrete and abstract nouns (book, laptop vs embarrassment, prejudice). [4]
A proper article indicates that its noun is proper, and refers to a unique entity. It may be the name of a person, the name of a place, the name of a planet, etc. The Māori language has the proper article a, which is used for personal nouns; so, "a Pita" means "Peter".
The proper noun (or the common noun when there is no proper noun) functions as the head of the nominal group; all other constituents work as modifiers of the head. The modifiers preceding the head are called premodifiers and the ones after it postmodifiers .
A proper name in linguistics – and in the specific sense employed at Wikipedia – is normally a kind of noun phrase. That is, it has a noun or perhaps another noun phrase as its core component (or head), and perhaps one or more modifiers. Most proper names have a proper noun as their head: Old Trafford; Bloody Mary.
Eugene Charniak points out in Statistical techniques for natural language parsing (1997) [4] that merely assigning the most common tag to each known word and the tag "proper noun" to all unknowns will approach 90% accuracy because many words are unambiguous, and many others only rarely represent their less-common parts of speech.