Questions tagged [animacy]
The animacy tag has no usage guidance.
9 questions
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Do all languages distinguish between persons and non-persons?
I am teaching the concept of "person" and "personhood" to my Grade 12 philosophy class, and we have a video to watch in which the philosopher observes that English pronouns ...
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Degree of animacy and time-travelling cats
I recently saw this tweet by 3blue1brown, and it got me thinking about how English phrases of the form "[noun] from [year]" work.
The distinction described in the tweet seems to reduce to ...
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Do any languages/cultures other than English apply non-grammatical gender to ships?
In the English language (or maybe in English-speaking cultures?) it's common to use feminine pronouns to refer to ships (and occasionally to other types of vehicles).
Are there any other languages/...
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Languages without generic term for animals
I'd recently read in a non-fiction work (reference lost) that there are some languages that have no generic term or category for animals, ie no equivalent of "animal." Does anyone have any information ...
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Inanimate pronouns in Hindi
Could someone give me some examples of inanimate pronouns in Hindi? I can't come up with any example myself. I was reading this paper:
Gazetteer Method for Resolving Pronominal Anaphora in Hindi ...
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Looking for books etc on gender animacy in Oromo
I request you if you are willing and able to help me on my linguistics thesis with the title of The morphosyntax of gender animacy and clitics in Oromo.
Oromo is one of the Cushitic branch languages ...
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Are deceased living things, or parts of living things, marked as animate in languages that mark animacy?
In natural languages that morphologically mark animacy vs. inanimacy on a largely semantic basis, (e.g. "hamster" is animate, "stone" is inanimate), which of the two noun-classes do terms for the ...
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Can animacy be grammatical or must it always be natural?
Animacy has come up in a few recent questions, especially in comparison to gender. One interesting thing that turned up in the comments on those questions was whether or not animacy can sometimes be ...
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Do some Slavic languages have an "extra" gender distinction for animate nouns?
I seem to recall hearing and reading that certain Slavic languages including Czech treat animate nouns as something like an extra gender. Even Wikipedia in some places counts more than three genders ...
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