A dedicated nominal singular morpheme without singulative semantics

I show that in Digor Ossetic, an agglutinative Eastern Iranian language spoken in the Caucasus, the nominal singular morpheme has a non-null allomorph -ɐ. I provide evidence that this morpheme does not cumulatively expone any other morphological features. However, it occurs with both count and non-count nouns and therefore does not express singulative semantics. I provide a Distributed Morphology analysis of number marking in Digor Ossetic and show that the morph -ɐ either spells out Num⁰ or is a dissociated node adjoined to Num⁰. I observe that overt dedicated marking of the singular and the plural also exists in Emai and [InlineEquation not available: see fulltext.]k[InlineEquation not available: see fulltext.], Edoid languages of Nigeria, and, as was recently showed, in Kipsigis (Nilotic). Accordingly, overt dedicated marking of the singular is likely to be a robustly attested phenomenon, which provides an additional argument in favor of treating of the singular as one of the values of a binary feature, rather than an absence of a feature.