Multi-layered indexicality: When proper names become categories

Proper names (PNs) are at the core of several long-standing inquiries in linguistics, revolving around their status as items with referential value but no sense, their formation and morphosyntax, and their change into common names in diachrony. Less attention has been devoted to PNs used synchronically and creatively to convey a property that is deemed typical of their referent, a mechanism related to what has been identified in the literature as ‘descriptive backing’ or ‘category extension’. In this paper, we offer an overview of the unexpectedly numerous morphological and syntactic environments where PNs may be employed to indicate ‘categories’ in discourse, based on naturally occurring Italian data from spoken and written corpora and the web (e.g., Ecco come Johnson non trumpeggia troppo contro Huawei sul 5G ‘Here is how Johnson doesn’t ‘trump’ too much against Huawei on 5G’; Democrazia in pericolo se arriva il Trump di turno ‘Democracy in danger if some Trump arrives’). We propose a unified mechanism for the interpretation of all these cases (irrespective of their structural level) called ‘multi-layered indexicality’, namely indexicality implying multiple variables, connected at different layers of meaning, that act simultaneously to explain how these expressions acquire a symbolic ‘ad hoc’ meaning from a purely indexical one.