Animacy / Humanness
Is the participant human, living, or non-living?
Significado
A feature that can influence grammar depending on whether a participant is human, animate, animal, object, abstract, or respected.
Como identificar
Notice whether people and living beings behave differently from objects in the sentence.
Exemplos
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?
Vista por língua
Na tua língua materna
Animacy is not a general object marker, but humanness affects pronoun choice, address forms, and some lexical choices.
Eu vi a Maria na estação.
I saw Maria at the station.
Na tua língua de aprendizagem
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.