Abstract
The lecture examines Albanian proper nouns/names in terms they express the notion of definiteness as compared to the English system in order to find out similarities and differences between both languages. Comparison with English is motivated, among other things, by the fact that there is extensive literature on the prototypical realisation of definiteness in English, which can be used to advantage as a starting point for the description of the Albanian system, where the literature is rather poor or even insufficient.
The study is divided in two major parts: a theoretical overview and a practical analysis.The theoretical part deals with the concept of definiteness in a larger perspective; a philosophical and typological insight. Moreover, two separate surveys, one for the English proper nouns/names and one for the Albanian proper nouns/names are drawn from what theoretical grammars have to say on the subject.
The English system is then partially applied to the Albanian proper names/nouns.The practical analysis examines in detail three types of selected Albanian proper names/nouns: personal names, geographical names and names of institutions/organizations (all the provided examples are driven from an Albanian corpus collected for the purposes of the study), always in comparison with English. The findings show that apart from the subject and/or the object position, Albanian proper nouns/names also appear definite in the genitive-possessive case (previously not mentioned in the grammars).
The application of the English system qualifies the results in one important aspect; it shows that in the overall corpus analysis, Albanian proper nouns/names tend to appear with a definite form/article. In English, the situation is different, as they are mostly articleless.