摘要：The validity of the most widely accepted view on the meaning of proper nouns (names) is taken under consideration, i.e. that proper nouns are devoid of lexical meaning or lexical content, that they are mere marks of their bearers, that for proper nouns lexical meaning is attainable only in context. In the paper, a draft of a catalogue of the real pragmatic uses of proper nouns in Croatian is given, a grammatical chapter Croatian grammar books lack. These five uses are distinguished: autonymic, metonymic, partitive, metaphoric, and omnipersonal. All of these uses are situated somewhere within a fuzzy scale with two extremes – identification (the prototypical function of proper nouns) on one end, and lexicalized, fossilized eponyms on the other. The possibility of proper nouns to function in all uses described in the paper is taken as a strong argument in favour of the not-so-widely accepted view that proper nouns do have meaning. In other words, it is maintained that proper nouns are proper nouns not only when used for identification, but in all of their uses. Those uses or functions are all equally immanent in the proper noun, and originate from the complex nature of proprial lexemes.
关键词：proper noun; meaning of names; autonym; metonymy; partitive meaning; metaphor; eponym; antonomasia; Croatian language
