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Grammatical features
Related to nouns
Animacy
Case
Dative construction
Dative shift
Quirky subject
Nominative
Comitative
Instrumental
Classifier
Measure word
Construct state
Countability
Count noun
Mass noun
Collective noun
Definiteness
Gender
Genitive construction
Possession
Suffixaufnahme (case stacking)
Noun class
Number
Singular
Dual
Plural
Singulative-Collective-Plurative
Specificity
Universal grinder
Related to verbs
Associated motion
Clusivity
Conjugation
Evidentiality
Modality
Person
Telicity
Mirativity
Tense–aspect–mood
Grammatical aspect
Lexical aspect (Aktionsart)
Mood
Tense
Voice
General features
Affect
Boundedness
Comparison (degree)
Egophoricity
Pluractionality (verbal number)
Honorifics (politeness)
Polarity
Reciprocity
Reflexive pronoun
Reflexive verb
Syntax relationships
Argument
Transitivity
Valency
Branching
Serial verb construction
Traditional grammar
Predicate
Subject
Object
Adjunct
Predicative
Semantics
Contrast
Mirativity
Thematic relation
Agent
Patient
Topic and Comment
Focus
Volition
Veridicality
Phenomena
Agreement
Polypersonal agreement
Declension
Empty category
Incorporation
Inflection
Markedness
v
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Animacy (antonym: inanimacy) is a grammatical and semantic feature, existing in some languages, expressing how sentient or alive the referent of a noun is.[1] Widely expressed, animacy is one of the most elementary principles in languages around the globe and is a distinction acquired as early as six months of age.[2]
Concepts of animacy constantly vary beyond a simple animate and inanimate binary; many languages function off of a hierarchical general animacy scale that ranks animacy as a "matter of gradience".[3] Typically (with some variation of order and of where the cutoff for animacy occurs), the scale ranks humans above animals, then plants, natural forces, concrete objects, and abstract objects, in that order. In referring to humans, this scale contains a hierarchy of persons, ranking the first- and second-person pronouns above the third person, partly a product of empathy, involving the speaker and interlocutor.[3]
^Santazilia, Ekaitz (2022-11-14), Animacy and Inflectional Morphology across Languages, Brill, doi:10.1163/9789004513068, ISBN 978-90-04-51306-8, S2CID 256298064, retrieved 2024-02-07
^Szewczyk, Jakub M.; Schriefers, Herbert (2010). "Is animacy special? ERP correlates of semantic violations and animacy violations in sentence processing". Brain Research. 1368: 208–221. doi:10.1016/j.brainres.2010.10.070. PMID 21029726. S2CID 33461799.
^ abYamamoto, Mutsumi (2006). Agency and impersonality: Their linguistic and cultural manifestations. Amsterdam: J. Benjamins Pub. Co. p. 36.
Animacy (antonym: inanimacy) is a grammatical and semantic feature, existing in some languages, expressing how sentient or alive the referent of a noun...
e. animacy and number (nouns) or person and number (verbs) are indicated within the same affix. All nouns are required to be inflected for animacy and...
and plural; and two animacy classes: animate (common), and inanimate (neuter). Adjectives and pronouns agree with nouns for animacy, number, and case....
that since there is no consistent semantic system for determining the animacy of a noun, that it must be a purely linguistic characterization. Anthropological...
fusional, e.g. animacy and number (nouns), are indicated within the same affix. All nouns are split into two categories and are inflected for animacy and are...
English nouns form the largest category of words in English, both in the number of different words and how often they are used in typical texts. The three...
declension of the nominal phrase in the locative cases differs depending on the animacy of the referent; a different and unrelated masculine/feminine distinction...
respectively, regardless of animacy, meaning "him", "her", or "it"), and le for indirect objects (regardless of gender or animacy, meaning "to him", "to her"...
singular. Verbs are divided into classes depending on the transitivity and animacy of their argument(s). Transitivity of a verb affects how many arguments...
subjects of transitive verbs and intransitive verbs. The definiteness and animacy scale of differential subject marking has the same hierarchical structure...
Eastern Armenian Which case the direct object takes is split based on animacy (a phenomenon more generally known as differential object marking). Inanimate...
pattern for each noun being inflected depends on the noun's degree of animacy. When a definite article such as -টা -ṭa (singular) or -গুলো -gulo (plural)...
sentence must occur first while the noun with lesser animacy occurs second. If both nouns are equal in animacy, then either noun can occur in the first position...
In linguistics, a causative (abbreviated CAUS) is a valency-increasing operation that indicates that a subject either causes someone or something else...
that noun's meaning (or attributes, like biological sex, humanness, or animacy). However, the existence of words that denote male and female, such as...
because of the characteristic features of its referent, such as gender, animacy, shape, but such designations are often clearly conventional. Some authors...
language, such as in Nairobi. In non-native Swahili, concord reflects only animacy: human subjects and objects trigger a-, wa- and m-, wa- in verbal concord...
primary (used for focused or high animacy nominative arguments), neutral (for low animacy nominative arguments and high animacy accusative ones), and focus...
These same scales are also reflected in Silverstein’s person/animacy hierarchy. Besides animacy and definiteness, another property that triggers differential...
main features marked on Sinhala nouns are case, number, definiteness and animacy. Sinhala distinguishes several cases. The five primary cases are the nominative...
emerges from a complicated interaction of factors such as referentiality, animacy and topicality. Mongolian also exhibits a specific type of differential...
menee he menevät se menee ne menee "he/she goes" "they go" loss of an animacy contrast in pronouns (ne and se are inanimate in the formal language),...
influenced as well. The Kartvelian languages have grammatical gender based on animacy, classifying objects as intelligent ("who"-class) and unintelligent ("what"-class)...
like one of Daedalus's "moving" statues, is inherently valuable, their animacy would mean they are worthless if the owner cannot shackle them in place...
show various levels of animacy in its grammar, with certain nouns taking specific verb forms according to their rank in this animacy hierarchy. For instance...
corpus study into word order variation in German subordinate clauses: Animacy affects linearization independently of grammatical function assignment"...
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