Named entities (NEs) constitute a great challenge for computational linguistics and one of the major research topics during the last decade. They can be divided in categories describing people, location, time, organization and others. In this paper we will restrict our discussion to proper names that belong to three main classes: personal, location and organization names, and that can be either single-word nouns or multiword expressions. First, we are going to define common (language-independent) semantic patterns for proper names and then we will present the corresponding syntactic patterns in English, Bulgarian, French, Greek, and Serbian. We will compare these patterns regarding grammatical categories of dependent constituents, definiteness, distribution of clitics, word order and various alternations. Our ultimate goal is to build a universal framework for Named Entity Recognition (NER).