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 -(SIC). 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 -(SIC) either spells out Num(0) or is a dissociated node adjoined to Num(0). I observe that overt dedicated marking of the singular and the plural also exists in Emai and k, 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.