A title designates the function or the social status of an individual. Often, it accompanies a proper noun, but it can also be used in place of a proper noun (if the bearer of the title is contextually unambiguous).
E.g. "The/Det German/Adj Chancellor/Title Angela/Name Merkel/Name said ..." can be used besides "the German Chancellor said ...".
Accordingly, some schemes (e.g., Chungku et al. 2010, for Dzongkha) group titles together with proper names (http://purl.org/olia/dzongkha.owl#ParticularPersonNoun).
However, if multiple people hold the same title, they can be referred to as a group, e.g., "Since WWII, the politics of the German chancellors always followed ...", and in this usage,
titles are more comparable to common nouns.
Functionally, titles are thus an intermediate category between CommonNoun and ProperNoun (cf. also Mulkern 1996).
Titles do, however, share important characteristics with common nouns.
In English, for example, titles generally require a definite determiner (unlike proper nouns), even if unambiguous ("the pope").
They are thus classified here as a subtype of CommonNoun.
(Ann E. Mulkern. The name of the game. In Jeanette Gundel and Thorstein Fretheim, editors. Reference and Referent Accessibility: Pragmatics
and Beyond. John Benjamins, Amsterdam and Philadelphia, 1996, pages 235–250.)
owl:versionInfo
added in accordance with Sajjad (2007, for Urdu, http://purl.org/olia/urdu.owl#Title)