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 maternelle
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 votre langue d’apprentissage
En anglais, les noms ne changent pas selon qu’ils désignent une personne, un animal ou un objet, mais cette différence influence les pronoms comme he, she, they, it, les relatifs who/which/that et le choix de certains mots.
The child said they were ready.
'they' = référence à une personne sans préciser le genre.
Les apprenants utilisent parfois trop it pour parler de personnes, ou hésitent entre who, which, that et they au singulier.
Good transfer potential
This block behaves relatively similarly, so you can transfer intuition more safely between the two languages.