Information AboutAnimacy |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT ANIMACY | |
| grammar | |
| grammatical gender | |
| linguistic morphology | |
|
Usually, animacy has to do with how alive or how Sentient a noun is. In general, personal Pronoun s have the highest animacy, the first-person being the highest among them. Other humans follow them, and animals, plants, natural forces such as winds, concrete things, and abstract things follow in this order; however, according to the spiritual beliefs of the people whose language possesses an animacy hierarchy, deities, spirits, or certain types of animal or plant may be ranked very highly in the hierarchy. The distinction between ''he/she'' and ''it'' is a distinction in animacy; some languages, such as Turkish and Spoken Finnish do not distinguish between ''s/he'' and ''it''. English, on the other hand, shows a similar lack of distinction between ''they'' animate and ''they'' inanimate. Animacy plays some roles in English , as in any other language. For example, the higher animacy a referent has, the less preferable it is to use the preposition ''of'' for possession, as follows:
The following examples also show the importance of animacy. Compare:
and
Examples of languages in which an animacy hierarchy is important include the Mexican language Totonac 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 Dichotomy of nouns based on animacy. Apachean example Like most Athabaskan languages, Southern Athabaskan languages 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, 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): Human > Infant/Big Animal > Medium-sized Animal > Small Animal > Natural Force > Abstraction Generally, the most animate noun in a 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. So, both example sentences (1) and (2) are correct. The ''yi-'' prefix on the verb indicates that the 1st noun is the subject and ''bi-'' indicates that the 2nd noun is the subject. But example sentence (3) sounds wrong to most Navajo speakers because the less animate noun occurs before the more animate noun: In order express this idea, the more animate noun must occur first, as in sentence (4): ANIMACY HIERARCHY AND SPLIT ERGATIVITY Animacy can also condition the nature of the morphologies of languages which are Split-ergative . In such languages, participants which are more animate are more likely to be the Agent of the verb, and therefore are marked in an accusative pattern: unmarked in the agent role and marked in the patient or oblique role. Likewise, less animate participants are inherently more patient-like, and take ergative marking: unmarked when in the patient role and marked when in the agent role. The hierarchy of animacy generally, but not always, is ordered: The location of the split (the line which divides the inherently agentive participants from the inherently patientive participants) varies from language to language, and in many cases the two classes overlaps, with a class of nouns near the middle of the hierarchy being marked for both the agent and patient roles. REFERENCES
|
|
|