A corpus study of Greek bare singulars: implications for an analysis: Special issue: Weak Definiteness and Referentiality

In this paper we present results of a corpus study on Greek bare singulars. This study made corpus data for the fi rst time available for the whole set of verbs that have been claimed to allow for bare singular count nouns (BSCNs) in Greek. First we discuss two of the classes of verbs that allow BSCNs, creation verbs and existential constructions. Then we argue that BSCNs are not number neutral and that they seem to have an argumental status, thus leading us to argue that a “strict” pseudoincorporation analysis à la Espinal & McNally (2011) for instance is not supported for Greek. Our data and analysis seem to indicate that a “liberal” kind of pseudoincorporation in the sense of Dayal (2011) could provide an analysis for Greek.