Names, Light Nouns, and Countability

Making use of Kayne’s (2005, 2010) theory of light nouns, this article 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 article 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.