Names, Light Nouns, and Countability
Friederike Moltmann
October 2021
 

Making use of Kayne's (2005, 2010) theory of light nouns, this paper argues that light nouns are part of (simple) names and that a mass-count distinction among light nouns explains the behavior of certain types of names in German as mass rather than count. The paper elaborates the role of light nouns with new generalizations regarding their linguistic behavior in quantificational and pronominal NPs, their selection of relative pronouns in German, and a general difference in the support of plural anaphora between English and German.
Format: [ pdf ]
Reference: lingbuzz/005373
(please use that when you cite this article)
Published in: to appear in Linguistic Inquiry
keywords: light nouns, proper names, mass-count distinction, predicativism, sortals, absolute generality, dummy sortals, semantics, syntax
previous versions: v4 [June 2021]
v3 [June 2021]
v2 [May 2021]
v1 [August 2020]
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