The conference The Grammar of Proper Names - A Typological Perspective will be held later this year in Regensburg, Germany. I'm particularly interested how insights on this topic can be applied to place-name studies. Below I reproduce the introduction of the announcement on LinguistList, which contains more details on the subject:

Proper names are perhaps a universal class of expressions. The typical and most important members of this class are anthroponyms, i.e. names that refer to human individuals and toponyms, i.e. names that refer to distinct individual places. They are lexical units of various morphological and syntactic complexity, i.e. they may be single lexical morphemes, morphological complex words, or multiword syntactic constructions. The morphosyntactic behavior of proper names deviates significantly from that of other syntactic categories such as common nouns and personal pronouns. Within the noun phrase proper names show various distributional restrictions compared to common nouns. On the other hand, they have usually more distributional possibilities than e.g. personal pronouns. In addition, proper names often exhibit deviations with regard to the coding of the core grammatical relations within the clause. For instance, proper names may show different case marking patterns compared to common nouns and personal pronouns. Furthermore, one can find specific morphological categories such as the vocative case and the proper name marker in the languages of the world, which are more or less confined to proper names as a syntactic category.

Invited speakers are Mark van de Velde (Paris CNRS; confirmed) and Willy Van Langendonck (Katholike Universiteit Leuven; confirmed). There is a call for papers: papers that present a descriptive perspective on proper names in European but also and preferably in non-European languages are as welcome as papers that deal with the more general typological questions mentioned above. Maximal one page abstracts should be submitted no later than March, 31 by e-Mail.

Update (21 July 2010): there's now also a conference webpage, with programme and abstracts.