Based on a large sample of press data extracted from the British National Corpus BNC the book undertakes a detailed investigation of presentday English proper names an important but underresearched area in English linguistics. Employing the statistical technique of binary logistic regression this book presents a new method of analysing nondiscrete categories in linguistics with reference to the grammatical notion of gradience and the principle of parsimony. The focus is particularly on the grammatical factors influencing the choice between use and nonuse of the definite article a wellknown issue of uncertainty in modern English. The study also concentrates on multiword organisation names which have been little studied although they occur frequently in newspaper language and have special characteristics of their own. By making precise predictive statements about the conditions under which the definite article is preferred or dispreferred the book is also able to shed light on the theory of linguistic performance.