Animacy / Humanness
Is the participant human, living, or non-living?
Meaning
A feature that can influence grammar depending on whether a participant is human, animate, animal, object, abstract, or respected.
How to spot it
Notice whether people and living beings behave differently from objects in the sentence.
Examples
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?
Language View
In your native language
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
In your learning language
Animacy and humanness matter strongly in the personal 'a' and in pronoun choices.
Busco a mi hermano. Busco un libro.
I am looking for my brother. I am looking for a book.
Learners often fail to mark specific human direct objects with 'a'.
Good transfer potential
This block behaves relatively similarly, so you can transfer intuition more safely between the two languages.