Template talk:topic cat parents/Names

assumptions

Although not much is known about Taos grammar, it is not clear that Names should be under a Proper noun cat in Taos. This is because placenames may in fact be postpositional phrases instead of nouns. They are placenames because these phrases are used to refer to places but that does not entail that they will have the same part of speech as English.

Jumping to a language that I considerably more about, placenames in Apachean languages are often not nouns but are rather nominalized sentences. You can have a sentence like they took big dumps and nominalize it with an enclitic. This is similar to English nominalized sentences like that they took big dumps which is nominalized with the complementizer that as in that they took big dumps was known to everyone. The that they took big dumps clause acts as the subject of the sentence, but you wouldnt want to call that they took big dumps a noun.

So, this categorization may work for English and other European languages, it wont necessarily work elsewhere. Ishwar 04:04, 25 August 2008 (UTC)