Re: Animacy of nouns

Carsten wrote:
<<
My question is how do you know how animate a
noun is compared to another one? Are there rules (maybe only
rules of thumb), or is this completely up to the speaker, or
are there groups of "objects with high animateness",
"objects with an average animacy", "objects with a low
animacy", "inanimate objects", i.e. some kind of noun
classes for this?
 >>

First, this is language-specific.  So, for example, first person
tends to be more animate than second person, but there's a
rather famous native American language (I just can't remember
the name) where second person is more animate than first.

Payne chooses to think of this animacy hierarchy as rather
an agent-worthiness hierarchy.  That is, a first person argument
is more likely to be an agent that a second person argument.
Whether this holds is something that needs to be (and probably
has been and is being) tested.  In either case, there are general
tendencies cross-linguistically, and rather than trying to reproduce
the chart in Payne's book in an e-mail, I'll point you to my
ergativity reference--specifically, the part where I talk about
animacy:

http://dedalvs.free.fr/notes.html#4p4

Just scroll down a little and you'll see Payne's table (basically.
I think I cut out some stuff because it wouldn't fit).

-David
*******************************************************************
"sunly eleSkarez ygralleryf ydZZixelje je ox2mejze."
"No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn."

-Jim Morrison

http://dedalvs.free.fr/

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