Animacy / Humanness
Is the participant human, living, or non-living?
Betekenis
A feature that can influence grammar depending on whether a participant is human, animate, animal, object, abstract, or respected.
Zo herken je het
Notice whether people and living beings behave differently from objects in the sentence.
Voorbeelden
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?
Taaloverzicht
In je moedertaal
Animacy is not a major grammatical category, though pronouns and word choice can reflect it.
Iedereen is welkom.
Everyone is welcome.
In de taal die je leert
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.