This article reports on the results of four corpus studies investigating determinerless count nouns in different predicative contexts in German (i.e., copula sentences with sein ‘be’, werden ‘become’, bleiben ‘stay’ and predicative als-phrases). The starting point for these corpus studies is the recent literature on German copula sentences with sein that addresses the question which nouns need to occur with a determiner and which can occur determinerless when used predicatively (Hallab 2011; Geist 2019, 2014). The studies reported in this article provide a broad overview of the attested data, which shows that the near exclusive focus on copula sentences, as well as the way in which the data was compiled in the literature so far have led to a biased picture of
the determinerless predicative use of German count nouns. The data furthermore motivates the two theoretical results of this article: (i) a new characterization of the class of nouns that can occur determinerless in German copula sentences and (ii) a list of desiderata for future theoretical and formal analyses addressing which aspects of the determinerless occurrences can be attributed to the nouns and which are plausibly a result of the predicative contexts.
