Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1998. Vol. 2. Eger Journal of English Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 26)

Studies - Albert Vermes: Proper names in translation: a case study

seems to be supported by the fact that a descriptive name might be changed when the underlying description is no longer appropriate. Along these lines Lehrer (1992) argues that it is difficult to draw a dividing line between descriptive names and pure descriptions and, further, that most names provide some sort of information about the referent, that is, they may serve as the basis for making reasonable inferences about it (127). In relevance theory, the meaning of a lexical item consists in a logical entry and an encyclopaedic entry. The three different types of information (lexical, logical and encyclopaedic) are stored in different places in memory. The logical entry contains a set of deductive rules making up, in Lyons's terms, the intension (logical properties) of the lexical item, while the encyclopaedic entry contains information about the extension of the item (the group of entities it stands for) in the form of assumptions about it (Sperber and Wilson 1986: 86). I take it that the encyclopaedic entry also contains information about shared associations. The major difference between the logical and the encyclopaedic entries is that the former is finite and holds computational information, whereas the latter is open-ended and holds representational information. Sperber and Wilson suggest that when we process an assumption, the content is determined by the logical entries of the concepts it contains and the context in which it is processed is, at least partly, determined by the encyclopaedic entries of these concepts (Sperber and Wilson 1986: 91). In this model, prototypical proper names (that is names without a descriptive content) are handled by associating with them empty logical entries. In other (less prototypical) cases a name may also have a logical entry (or, in the case of a composite name, it may include several logical entries which combine to make up the logical content of the name) which is partly or fully definitional (Sperber and Wilson 1986: 91-2). Thus names seem to be not essentially unlike any other kinds of expression in terms of the structure of their meaning. Rather, what we find here is a continuum of various sorts of proper names, ranging from the prototypical (with a primaryreferential function) to the non-prototypical (with a stressed attributive function), which are practically indistinguishable from other non-referring definite descriptions. The fact that I use the terms prototypical and nonprototypical, however, is not meant to imply that the so-called prototypical names are more frequent than non-prototypical ones. 3.3 Types of proper names One further question that remains unclear from our initial definitions is what sort of entities may be referred to by a proper name. Here I see no 167