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I often see a noun such as "Jimmy" in my textbook represented as [DP_Jimmy]. But there is no more detail provided as to its internal structure. This means either the D is null such as:
or that "Jimmy" is functioning as a D, represented as
I suppose, like many things in linguistics, this may vary depending on your framework--but which one is more acceptable?
Proper nouns when considered as DPs will be merged with a phonetically null determiner. We can make this specific by positing that certain phonetically null determiners bear a uproper feature, that is an uninterpretable proper feature. This means that these Ds will merge with NPs bearing the feature proper.
We can complicate this further if we assume a nominal shell structure for the NP Jimmy.
