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When should I use macro \textsc ? What is common practice in document like diploma thesis? Should I use it for names of persons, names of described entities of particular interest or in some other cases? Is there a difference in usage between languages?

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Take a look at tex.stackexchange.com/q/29784/2552: This seems to be a LyX specific thing: It's apparently simply defined as \newcommand{\noun}[1]{\textsc{#1}}, so your question could be rephrased to "What things should I print in small caps?" (which in turn is probably off topic). – Jake Jan 3 at 19:52
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The reason @Jake thinks this is off topic is that conventions vary quite considerably from field to field and language to language. In my field, (linguistics) small caps are commonly used to mark syntactic categories in examples (perhaps this is the source of your \noun example) but this is a question that can't be answered with any generality and is not really related to TeX but to conventions in your field. – Alan Munn Jan 3 at 21:05
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Following on from @AlanMunn’s comment, I’d simply advise that you look at publications (articles, theses, books) in your area and use small caps (and all other typographic styles) as per the conventions in your field. Your advisor should be a source of advice about specifics. – Daniel Harbour Jan 3 at 21:08
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One more comment: as a general rule, you shouldn't ever use such text formatting commands directly, but use them within some sort of more semantic markup. This is probably the source of the \noun macro you referred to earlier. So if you decide that all elements of the kind "foo" should be set in small caps, you should make a command \foo which then uses \textsc. – Alan Munn Jan 3 at 21:09
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This topic might be suited for graphicdesign.SE under their tag typography‌​. – tohecz Jan 3 at 21:57
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closed as off topic by lockstep, Thorsten, Kurt, Stefan Kottwitz♦ Jan 4 at 12:42

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