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PROPN: proper noun

Definition

A proper noun is a noun that is the name of a specific individual, place, or object. Russian proper nouns are always written starting with an uppercase letter.

Single-word named entities should be tagged PROPN though they originate from a common noun (Грязь) (village) or an adjective (Белая) (river). Even if they were originally adjectives and inflect according to adjectival paradigms, they behave syntactically as nouns. For instance, Белая  (a river in Bashkortostan) is originally feminine form of the adjective белый  “warm” but as a geographical name, it is a noun. It denotes a concrete location (rather than a property of somebody/something) and its feminine gender is fixed (while adjectives have forms in all three genders).

Note that adjectives derived from geographical names (русский, английский  “Russian, English”) are written in lowercase and are not tagged PROPN.

Personal names are typically treated as a sequence of proper nouns (one or more given names and one or more surnames). If the name contains prepositions, conjunctions or articles (foreign names), these are tagged as ADP, CCONJ and DET, respectively.

Russian (and other Slavic) multi-word named entities have internal syntactic structure, which is preserved in the annotation. The headword is always noun and there may be other nouns involved. They will be tagged either PROPN or NOUN and possible ambiguities must be resolved individually. Modifying adjectives are never tagged PROPN. Even if an adjective is the first word of a multi-word name, and thus it starts with an uppercase letter, it is still tagged ADJ. Similarly, function words in named entities retain their normal tags. These rules are less strict for foreign named entities where the original part of speech is hidden for a Russian speaker.

Examples


PROPN in other languages: [bej] [bg] [bm] [cs] [cy] [da] [el] [en] [es] [et] [eu] [fi] [fro] [fr] [ga] [grc] [hu] [hy] [it] [ja] [ka] [kk] [kpv] [ky] [myv] [no] [pcm] [pt] [qpm] [ru] [sl] [sv] [tr] [tt] [uk] [u] [urj] [yue] [zh]