Tightness and distinguished Fréchet spaces ✩

Valdivia invented a nondistinguished Fréchet space whose weak bidual is quasi-Suslin but not K-analytic. We prove that Grothendieck/Köthe’s original nondistinguished Fréchet space serves the same purpose. Indeed, a Fréchet space is distinguished if and only if its strong dual has countable tightness, a corollary to the fact that a (DF)-space is quasibarrelled if and only if its tightness is countable. This answers a Cascales/ Ka˛kol/Saxon question and leads to a rich supply of (DF)-spaces whose weak duals are quasi-Suslin but not K-analytic, including the spaces Cc(κ) for κ a cardinal of uncountable cofinality. Our level of generality rises above (DF)- or even dual metric spaces to Cascales/Orihuela’s class G. The small cardinals b and d invite a novel analysis of the Grothendieck/Köthe example, and are useful throughout. © 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.