Animacy / Humanness
Is the participant human, living, or non-living?
含义
A feature that can influence grammar depending on whether a participant is human, animate, animal, object, abstract, or respected.
如何识别
Notice whether people and living beings behave differently from objects in the sentence.
示例
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
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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?
语言视角
在母语中
Animacy and humanness are not grammatical gender, but they affect pronouns, classifiers such as 位, address terms, and some natural expression choices.
这位老师很有名。
zhè wèi lǎoshī hěn yǒumíng = this respectful CL teacher is famous
在目标语言中
Animacy and masculine-personal status affect case and plural agreement.
Widzę psa.
I-see dog-ANIM.
Learners miss why masculine objects sometimes look genitive.
Good transfer potential
This block behaves relatively similarly, so you can transfer intuition more safely between the two languages.