Animacy / Humanness
Is the participant human, living, or non-living?
Signification
A feature that can influence grammar depending on whether a participant is human, animate, animal, object, abstract, or respected.
Comment le repérer
Notice whether people and living beings behave differently from objects in the sentence.
Exemples
person|dog|tree|stone|idea
a person vs a thing|who vs what
I saw Maria at the station.
Visual guide
participant: Maria / dog / stone
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animacy feature
human? animal? thing? idea?
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grammar may change:
pronoun, object marker,
honorific, plural
same role: object of 'saw' I saw Maria. human I saw a dog. animate I saw a stone. thing Some languages: higher animacy -> extra marking lower animacy -> less/no marking who? vs what?
Vue par langue
Dans votre langue
Animacy is not a general object marker, but humanness affects pronoun choice, relative pronouns, and lexical patterns.
J’ai vu Marie à la gare.
I saw Marie at the station.
Dans la langue d’apprentissage
Animacy and masculine-personal status affect case and plural agreement.
Widzę psa.
I-see dog-ANIM.
Learners miss why masculine objects sometimes look genitive.
Good transfer potential
This block behaves relatively similarly, so you can transfer intuition more safely between the two languages.