Noncompositional

The always-entertaining Geoffrey Pullum has recently remarked on the seeming weirdness of English proper names and definite articles. He notes that though human-referring proper names do not normally appear with determiners, there is a niche of productivity. When the name is modified attributively (like sharp-eyed, attentive-to-language), then a determiner is all required. Except when introducing a character in subject position in which case you can say something like Foolishly brave Qarn Trippian stepped out from the dragon’s cave and triumphantly waved his bloodied hand. (I suspect that some people might also be willing to ignore the formal requirement, as long as you’re introducing a new character, as in and who did I run into but always ridiculously funny Brian Regan. But I could be wrong.)

There are other places in English where the structure determiner-modifier-HumanName can appear, as noted in the LL post. These are cases like the Qarn I knew back in monster-killing camp and the Qarn of Targor, not the Qarn of Pindrell, which are sometimes talked about in terms of conceptual coersion from proper noun to common noun. A more familiar example might be the use of possessives when disambiguating between acquaintances of different people who happen to have the same name (”I saw Jim the other day” — “Oh, the guy in your Onomastics class?” — “No, Julie’s Jim. You know, the one she always has lunch with”)

Geoff didn’t mention indefinite articles, but of course a/an can occur with people names as well. One use is to mention people whose names you know, but who otherwise you know nothing about: a Joe Bilk called you earlier today. (You can also use this in a similar fashion; it’s used when some but not all people in a conversation are familiar with the person being talked about). Another is a counterpart to the construction that Geoff was discussing: rather than describing a permanent characteristic of someone (sharp-eyed), you can express a temporary condition: a very ecstatic William Silverman went home that evening. Without this modification, you either have a very very ill-formed sentence, or you implicate that you don’t know who William Silverman is.

Finally, getting away from proper names, but sticking with indefinite determiners, you can get very interesting phrases of the general shape a [modifier] [number] [noun], as in a cool thirty-point-five million dollars, a mere six books and a scant forty-nine people. If you take out the modifier you have a truly bad structure. This use of modifiers somehow reminds me of the always-tricky transparent group-nouns, as in a herd of elephants and a group of telemarketers. And indeed these modifiers seem to say something about the amounts involved, rather than any description of the items involved (cf ???a poorly-bound six books). Of course if you remove the transparent noun (and the of) you have badness (*a elephants), but the phrases with attributive modifiers initially seem to be rather different, structurally at least.