| Summary: | The aim of this paper is to highlight the diffrences between the so-called general vs. unspecified nouns through the so-called general human nouns (man, individual, person, ...) generally left out of the debate. We compare these three nominal subcategories on the basis of criteria that are rarely used in the literature concerning them: in addition to usage and frequency, we differentiate them on the basis of their degree of abstraction, the semantic variations they manifest according to discourse genres and their discursive functions, and according to their potential for construction and grammaticalization. We thus show that only certain uses of these names, whether they are NHG, NG or Nss, "act as" NG, Nss, etc., and that they are not used in the same way as NG, NG or Nss.
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