TY - JOUR
T1 - A dedicated nominal singular morpheme without singulative semantics
AU - Erschler, David
N1 - Funding Information:
The research was funded by Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V.
PY - 2022/5/1
Y1 - 2022/5/1
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - Distributed morphology
KW - Morphological features
KW - Morphology
KW - Nominal singular marking
KW - Ossetic
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85124988641&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/s11525-022-09392-2
DO - 10.1007/s11525-022-09392-2
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85124988641
VL - 32
SP - 249
EP - 276
JO - Morphology
JF - Morphology
SN - 1871-5621
IS - 2
ER -