Bare Singulars and Pseudo-Incorporation in Western Armenian

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the way the denotation of the bare singular and the process of Pseudo-Incorporation (PI) interact in Western Armenian (WA). We argue that bare singulars in WA unambiguously denote properties of kinds, thus differing significantly from languages like English and Turkish, where they are ambiguous between object-level and kind-level properties (Dayal 2004, Sağ 2019). Our argument comes from Pseudo-Incorporation. WA allows PI of [Num (CLF) Nsg] elements (covert plurals) which denote object-level properties. At the same time, PI-ed NPs (either bare singulars or covert plurals) accept only kind- level modification. This cannot be accounted by restricting PI to kind-denoting NPs (like in Turkish, Sağ 2019), as object-level properties (i.e. covert plurals) are also PI-ed. We derive the pattern by building an analysis of PI where the bare singular is unambiguously kind-denoting.