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- Title
Definiteness and Specificity in Mavea.
- Authors
Guérin, Valérie
- Abstract
Specificity and definiteness are universal semantic categories, but not all languages express these categories morphologically. In this paper, I present data from Ma&vuml;ea, a language spoken in northern Vanuatu, which show morphological expressions of these two semantic categories. I argue that in Ma...ea, the article le denotes specificity, aite encodes indefiniteness, te ... aite refers to indefinite nonspecific expressions, while the lack of an article expresses definiteness.
- Subjects
VANUATU; LINGUISTICS; LANGUAGE &; languages; SEMANTICS; COMPARATIVE linguistics; MORPHOLOGY
- Publication
Oceanic Linguistics, 2007, Vol 46, Issue 2, p538
- ISSN
0029-8115
- Publication type
Article