Abstract
<p>When a proprietor names a shop after a person, the personal name rarely stands alone: it is wrapped in grammar. English speakers add a possessive clitic (Joe's); French speakers prepose a locative particle (Chez Marie); Mandarin and Hokkien speakers attach a familiar honorific (老, 小, 阿); and across most of the world the bare name suffices. This paper offers the first population-scale typology of that grammatical packaging. From a companion corpus of 1,052,019 unique business names across 193 countries derived from OpenStreetMap, we classify every person-named venue by the surface form of its naming construction (possessive, honorific/particle, or bare) using a transparent, surface-string method that does not depend on the corpus's secondary semantic labels. Three findings organize the typology. First, the bare personal name is the global default, dominant in 171 of 193 territories. Second, the possessive construction is narrowly Anglophone: the United States is the only large possessive-dominant country (53.0%), with other English-speaking nations at 34–45% and the construction effectively absent (~0%) from Romance, Slavic, Turkic, Semitic, and East Asian naming. Third, honorific/particle marking peaks in Sinophone (China 35.8%, Taiwan 40.0%) and Southeast Asian (Indonesian 24.6%, Vietnamese 22.4%, Thai 21.2%) usage, with French Chez the European maximum (France, 17.2%). The organizing claim is a form–frequency dissociation: how often businesses are personally named is roughly constant across cultures (documented in the companion paper at a mean 22.6% of independent venues), whereas how the name is grammatically encoded varies sharply and along clean linguistic lines. We position this as novel at scale (the constructions are known to chrematonymics) and read the divergence as a socio-onomastic signature of each speech community's politeness and ownership grammar. Semantic sub-analyses (namesake, gender, name origin) are exploratory; human validation of the underlying personal-name label gives 89.5% accuracy (Cohen's κ = 0.79) across nine languages and four script families.</p>