Animacy / Humanness
Is the participant human, living, or non-living?
Ý nghĩa
A feature that can influence grammar depending on whether a participant is human, animate, animal, object, abstract, or respected.
Cách nhận biết
Notice whether people and living beings behave differently from objects in the sentence.
Ví dụ
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?
Góc nhìn theo ngôn ngữ
Trong ngôn ngữ mẹ đẻ của Bạn
Vietnamese has no broad animacy agreement system, but humanness strongly affects pronouns, classifiers and address terms.
Tôi gặp người đó.
I meet person that
Trong ngôn ngữ Bạn đang học
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.