 The Cambridge Grammar of English distinguishes the syntactic category of proper name from that of proper noun (Payne &amp; Huddleston 2002: 516). A proper noun is a word-level unit of the category noun, while a proper name is a type of noun phrase. So, for example, the proper name “Alice Walker” consists of two proper nouns: “Alice” and “Walker”. A proper name (the noun phrase) may also—and often does—consist of a single proper noun, just as a verb phrase may consist of a lone verb. Hence, the sentence “Alice sleeps” is comprised of a noun phrase/proper name and a verb phrase; the noun phrase contains a single proper noun, and the verb phrase consists of a lone verb. Its analysis into syntactic constituents would look like this: 