The Morphosyntax of Proper Names: Individuals, Sets and the Light Noun Hypothesis

Abstract

This paper examines the morphosyntax of proper names, with a focus on Italian. We argue that the morphosyntax of proper names is not uniform. Rather, we show that a crucial distinction lies between names denoting individuals and those denoting sets: while the former types of names undergo Merge in D, the latter do not. Our data moreover challenge the hypothesis that names can involve light nouns in their structure, as recently argued by Moltmann (2022) for German.

Keywords

• Proper Names
• Morphosyntax
• Italian
• Light Nouns
• Sortal Nouns