Concept

Animacy

Summary
Animacy (antonym: inanimacy) is a 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, Georgian, Spoken Finnish and Italian 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): My face is correct while *the face of mine would sound very strange. The man's face and the face of the man are both correct, but the former is preferred. The clock's face and the face of the clock are both correct.
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