Animacy

Animacy (antonym: inanimacy) is a grammatical and semantic feature, existing in some languages, expressing how sentient or alive the referent of a noun is. 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. Animacy (antonym: inanimacy) is a grammatical and semantic feature, existing in some languages, expressing how sentient or alive the referent of a noun is. 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. 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.' 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. The distinction between he, she, and other personal pronouns, on one hand, and it, on the other hand is a distinction in animacy in English and in many Indo-European languages. The same can be said about distinction between who and what. Some languages, such as Turkish and Spoken Finnish do not distinguish between s/he and it. In Finnish, there is a distinction in animacy between hän 'he/she' and se 'it', but in Spoken Finnish, se can mean 'he/she'. English shows a similar lack of distinction between they animate and they inanimate in the plural but, as shown above, it has such a distinction in the singular. There is another example of how animacy plays some role in English. For example, the higher animacy a referent has, the less preferable it is to use the preposition of for possession (that can also be interpreted in terms of alienable or inalienable possession): Examples of languages in which an animacy hierarchy is important include the Totonac language in Mexico and the Southern Athabaskan languages (such as Western Apache and Navajo) whose animacy hierarchy has been the subject of intense study. The Tamil language has a noun classification based on animacy. Because of the similarities in morphology of feminine and masculine grammatical gender inflections in Indo-European languages, there is a theory that in an early stage, the Proto-Indo-European language had only two grammatical genders: 'animate' and 'inanimate/neuter'; the most obvious difference being that inanimate/neuter nouns used the same form for the nominative, vocative, and accusative noun cases. The distinction was preserved in Anatolian languages like Hittite, all of which are now extinct. (Sanskrit still preserves this form for neuter gender nouns - nominative and accusative forms are the same.) The animate gender would then later, after the separation of the Anatolian languages, have developed into the feminine and masculine genders. The plural of neuter/inanimate nouns is believed to have had the same ending as collective nouns in the singular, and some words with the collective noun ending in singular were later to become words with the feminine gender. Traces can be found in Ancient Greek in which the singular form of verbs was used when they referred to neuter words in plural. In many Indo-European languages, such as Latin and the Slavic languages, the plural ending of many neuter words in the merged nominative–accusative–vocative corresponds to the feminine singular nominative form. Like most other Athabaskan languages, Southern Athabaskan languages show various levels of animacy in their grammar, with certain nouns taking specific verb forms according to their rank in this animacy hierarchy. For instance, Navajo nouns can be ranked by animacy on a continuum from most animate (a human) to least animate (an abstraction) (Young & Morgan 1987: 65-66):