Animacy / Humanness
Is the participant human, living, or non-living?
意味
A feature that can influence grammar depending on whether a participant is human, animate, animal, object, abstract, or respected.
見分け方
Notice whether people and living beings behave differently from objects in the sentence.
例
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
|
animacy feature
human? animal? thing? idea?
|
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?
言語別ビュー
母語の仕組み
Japanese has no broad grammatical animacy system, but humanness affects counters, respect terms and person reference.
駅で田中さんを見た。
I saw Mr./Ms. Tanaka at the station.
学習言語では
English does not have grammatical animacy marking on nouns, but humanness and animacy affect pronouns, relative pronouns, and word choice.
The child said they were ready.
they = person reference without gender specification
Learners may overuse 'it' for people or struggle with who/which/that and singular they.
Good transfer potential
This block behaves relatively similarly, so you can transfer intuition more safely between the two languages.