Specificity in the Samoan article system

(elicitation materials for scopal ambiguities)

This project centers on the little-understood semantic distinction between the Samoan articles le and se, historically characterized as the specific and non-specific articles. I show that the distinction between these two articles is much more complicated than any traditional notion of ``specificity”. This work was presented at the 32nd Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association as a presentation (AFLA 32) (see my presentation here), and will appear in the AFLA 32 proceedings (preprint here).