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Definiteness and specificity in Mavea.(Report)
- Article from:
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Oceanic Linguistics
- Article date:
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December 1, 2007
- Author:
- Guerin, Valerie
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Copyright informationCOPYRIGHT 2007 University of Hawaii Press. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Specificity and definiteness are universal semantic categories, but not all languages express these categories morphologically. In this paper, I present data from Mavea, a language spoken in northern Vanuatu, which show morphological expressions of these two semantic categories. I argue that in Mavea, the article le denotes specificity, aite encodes indefiniteness, te ... aite refers to indefinite nonspecific expressions, while the lack of an article expresses definiteness.
1. INTRODUCTION. Specificity and definiteness are universal semantic categories, but not all languages express these categories morphologically (Chesterman 1991:162; Ionin, Zubizaretta, and Maldonado to ...