The internal structure of proper names: Surnames, patronymics and relational elements

Abstract

This article researches patronymics in a broad sense – taken as components of a proper name that, morphologically, can be decomposed in a first name and a morpheme – with a focus on Spanish and Belarusian – the second conforming to a narrow definition of patronymic, where it is a component of a proper name distinct from both the first name and the surname. Our claim is that patronymics are the syntactic result of combining a first name with relational structure, a PP layer in the case of Spanish, and both a pP and a PP layer in the case of Belarusian. This research will allow us to probe inside the internal structure of complex proper names, including the relation between first name and surname, first name and patronymic, complex first names and complex surnames.