The coding of (in)definiteness in northern Vanuatu: Anaphora, specificity, topicality The contrast of definiteness, coded for example by the noun articles of Germanic or Romance languages, is left unspecified in about one third of the world’s languages (Dryer 2013). This paper will compare 17 Oceanic languages of northern Vanuatu, and examine how they structure the semantic domain of definiteness, based on corpora of spontaneous speech. Like many Oceanic languages, those of N.V. have an article that precedes their common nouns, yet whose functions do not include definiteness: an NP of the form {ART+N} (see grayed cells in table) is thus ambiguous between [+DEF] and [-DEF] readings. That said, N.V. languages do have a number of optional particles that are devoted to such reference-tracking functions, yet with a distribution that does not match a simple binary system [+/-DEF]. Some morphemes combine definite¬ness with semantic specificity, with noticeable effects on their combinatorics. For example, Lo-Toga (Torres Is.) contrasts two indefinite markers, si [-DEF, -SPEC] vs. sise [-DEF, +SPEC]: si is typically found in negative and/or irrealis clauses, whereas realis affirmative clauses normally use only the specific indefinite sise. The neighbouring language Hiw cuts up this functional domain even further, as it contrasts between two specific indefinite markers depending on the topicality of their referent in discourse (see Givón 1990:893-944). Using the five-way typology of definite articles proposed by Dryer (2014), I will show that the handling of referents in N.V. languages can differ substantially from one language to the other (see table): Hiw contrasts five categories, Lo-Toga four, while their neighbour Lehali, with its only two categories, ends up with a binary contrast [+DEF] vs. [-DEF] which initially seemed so elusive in this area. Knowing how the grammatical structures of N.V. languages otherwise tend to be mutually iso¬morph¬ic (François 2011), this typological diversity internal to the northern Vanuatu area is worthy of attention.