It is well known that personal pronouns in Japanese such as kare ‘he’ and kanozyo ‘she’, unlike their English counterparts, cannot be construed as bound variables in logical form. The purpose of this article is to argue that this cross-linguistic difference is due to the difference in syntactic categories. English personal pronouns are determiners (Postal 1969), exemplifying what will be referred to as D-PRONOUNS, and can be construed as bound variables, whereas Japanese personal pronouns are nouns, exemplifying what will be referred to as N-PRONOUNS, and cannot be so construed. I argue that this follows from a general condition on binding that applies only to functional items, and not to lexical ones. I provide empirical and conceptual support for this hypothesis on the basis of the behavior of such elements as articles, determiners, and demonstrative pronouns as well as that of personal pronouns.

A history of the notion of properhood in philosophy and linguistics is given. Two long-standing ideas, (i) that proper names have no sense, and (ii) that they are expressions whose purpose is to refer to individuals, cannot be made to work comprehensively while proper is understood as a subcategory of linguistic units, whether of lexemes or phrases. Phrases of the type the old vicarage, which are potentially ambiguous with regard to properhood, encourage the suggestion that proper is best understood as a mode of reference contrasting with semantic reference; in the former, the intension/sense of any lexical items within the referring expression, and any entailments they give rise to, are canceled. Proper names are all those expressions that refer nonintensionally. Linguistic evidence is given that this opposition can be grammaticalized, a speculation is made about its neurological basis, and psycholinguistic evidence is adduced in support. The proper noun, as a lexical category, is argued to be epiphenomenal on proper names as newly defined. Some consequences of the view that proper names have no sense in the act of reference are explored; they are not debarred from having senses (better: synchronic etymologies) accessible during other (meta)linguistic activities.

The occurrence of WH-items at the right edge of the sentence, while extremely rare in spoken languages, is quite common in sign languages. In particular, in sign languages like LIS (Italian Sign Language) WH-items cannot be positioned at the left edge. We argue that existing accounts of right-peripheral occurrences of WH-items are empirically inadequate and provide no clue as to why sign languages and spoken languages differ in this respect. We suggest that the occurrence of WH-items at the right edge of the sentence in sign languages be taken at face value: in these languages, WH-phrases undergo rightward movement. Based on data from LIS, we argue that this is due to the fact that WH-NONMANUAL MARKING (NMM) marks the dependency between an interrogative complementizer and the position that the WH-phrase occupies before it moves. The hypothesis that NMM can play this role also accounts for the spreading of negative NMM with LIS negative quantifiers. We discuss how our analysis can be extended to ASL (American Sign Language) and IPSL (Indo-Pakistani Sign Language). Our account is spelled out in the principles-and-parameters framework. In the last part of the article, we relate our proposal to recent work on prosody in spoken languages showing that WH-dependencies can be prosodically marked in spoken languages. Overt movement and prosodic marking of the WH-dependency do not normally cooccur in spoken languages, while they are possible in sign languages. We propose that this is due to the fact that sign languages, unlike spoken languages, are multidimensional.