Shifting animacy

Abstract

We examine the effects of morphosyntactic marking and selectional restrictions of predicates on conceptual and grammatical animacy. We argue in favour of animacy as an ontological category with human, animate and inanimate entities representing discrete subtypes in the domain of entities. We distinguish between conceptual animacy, which is a gradient notion, and grammatical animacy, for which discrete, binary oppositions are needed. The main aim of this paper is to argue for a distinction between overt and covert type shifts in animacy. On the one hand, overt shifts are linguistic solutions to type mismatches in the grammar. Crucially, these type shifts do not involve a shift in conceptual animacy. Covert animacy shifts, on the other hand, brought about by selectional restrictions or by the linguistic context in general, do involve a proper type shift in conceptual animacy. By making explicit the relation between the gradience of conceptual and the discreteness of grammatical animacy, and by exploring the distinction between covert and overt type shifts that involve animacy, we hope to gain a deeper understanding of animacy and its effects on language.

When Language Models Fall in Love: Animacy Processing in Transformer Language Models

“…Animacy in cognition is often framed as a gradient phenomenon (de Swart and de Hoop, 2018). In language, this often simplifies to a tripartite hierarchy (humans > animals > objects) or a binary (humans & animals > objects); entities are distinguished synactically or morphologically by their position therein (Comrie, 1989).…”

Unexpected (in)animate argument marking

“…Animacy is often thought of as an inherent property of arguments, whereas other prominence features such as specificity are not (cf. de Swart & de Hoop 2007, 2018. With animate referents being conceptually more prominent than inanimate ones, subjects being more prominent than objects, and Agents being more prominent than Patients, the question arises how speakers choose to encode messages in which the Patient rather than the Agent is the topic or high-prominent argument of the sentence (cf.…”

The two faces of animacy

“…Biologically inanimate entities may be considered animate or vice versa, depending on cultural, discursive, and pragmatic/transitory factors (Becker & Oka 1974;Lakoff 1987;Yamamoto 1999;Kittilä et al 2011;Swart & de Hoop 2018;Sorlin & Gardelle 2018;Santazilia 2019). Moreover, there is general agreement that the representation of animacy as a hierarchical continuum, namely human > animate > inanimate instead of as a pure bipartite split, 3 gives a better account of linguistic phenomena (Comrie 1989(Comrie [1981; Croft 1990, but cf.…”