Introduction

Abstract

Languages tend to exhibit different treatments of the entities of the extralinguistic world, with phrases that denote human beings (or more generally animates) at the top and phrases that denote inanimates at the bottom. This ranking is known as the Animacy Hierarchy. Croft (2003: 128) terms it one of the 'best known grammatical hierarchies', and the notion is so crucially important that it has made its way into the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics (Matthews 2007) or the Oxford English Dictionary (2017). 'Animacy' is not to be understood just in its everyday sense, as 'endowed with life, living, alive' (OED 2017); the Animacy Hierarchy further isolates a 'human' category, reflecting an anthropocentric filter on conceptualisation. This is obvious, for instance, in the gender system of standard English. First, while humans (especially adults) are referred to as he or she when their sex is known, a statistical analysis shows that animals have a nearly 20% chance of being referred to as it when the antecedent noun phrase specifies their sex, regardless of whether the anaphor is far from the antecedent or in the same clause (Gardelle 2013). This is evidence of a filter for humans alone. Secondly, the issue of sexism in the use of purportedly sex-neutral he only targets references to humans, not animals: he for the average American or with the antecedent 'your child' in non-specific contexts is viewed as problematic, but it does not come under any criticism when used for the non-specific raccoon (e.g. you cannot have a meaningful conversation with a raccoon, although he may occasionally nod 1 ) (Gardelle 2015, Chevalier et al. 2017. The implicatures of this human-based filter are well summed up by Yamamoto (1999: 1): 'The concept of 'animacy' can be regarded as some kind of assumed cognitive scale extending from human through animal to inanimate.' 1 'How to outsmart a raccoon Okay, let's start from the beginning on this one. Everyone says raccoons are smart, but that isn't true. With the possible exception of Uncle Bob, every human being you've ever met is smarter than the smartest raccoon that's ever been. A raccoon can't count to ten, at least not out loud, and you can't have a meaningful conversation with a raccoon, although he may occasionally nod in a way that implies he understands and agrees with your position on protectionism and its effect on international trade. Raccoons are focused and persistent […]' (Smith 2010: 200)

Pets as family members: Conflicting practices in the use of third-person pronouns to refer to companion animals in written biographical stories in Finnish

“…The choice of pronoun is a decision about whether to promote the nonhuman animal referent to the same category in the Animacy Hierarchy as humans or to treat the referent similarly to inanimate objects (for more on the Animacy Hierarchy, see Gardelle & Sorlin 2018). Peltola (2021: 416) argued that standardised languages tend to emphasise the linguistic separation of categories of 'human' and 'non human', creating a strong boundary; in non-standardised speech, these categories are flexible.…”

The verb–self link: An implicit association test study

“…The extended argument dependency model for language processing (Alday et al, 2014 ; Bornkessel & Schlesewsky, 2006 ) specifies that sentence comprehension follows the same general tendency to detect cues of agency as precisely and quickly as possible (Frith & Frith, 2010 ) because it is crucial to determine who plays the role of an agent. Accordingly, across languages, the position of agent (i.e., the one responsible for what is happening) is a privileged position for sentence processing (Gardelle & Sorlin, 2018 ).…”

“…Overall, findings from the domains of both psycholinguistics and social psychology point to the privileged connection of self and agency (cf. Dahl, 2008 ; Gardelle & Sorlin, 2018 ).…”