Definiteness and Specificity in Mavea

Specificity and definiteness are universal semantic categories, but not all languages express these categories morphologically. In this paper, I present data from Maea

a, a language spoken in northern Vanuatu, which show morphological expressions of these two semantic categories. I argue that in Maea the article le denotes specificity, aite encodes indefiniteness, te . . . aite refers to indefinite nonspecific expressions, while the lack of an article expresses definiteness.