[Lingtyp] animacy hierarchy: exceptions based on shape

[Martin Haspelmath]

It seems that David's question is not really about "exceptions to the 
animacy scale" – because the scale itself implies no claim. There are 
various claims about grammatical coding that reference a scale such as 
"human > (non-human) animal > inanimate", especially with regard to 
plural marking, object flagging, and indexing (subject, object, and others).

But Japanese iru vs. aru, or English she/he vs. it, has nothing to do 
with this scale – these are contrasting forms whose occurrence depends 
on a subclassification of nouns or nominal referents, i.e. they fall in 
the domain of nominal classification (or nomification).

It seems that "exceptions" become relevant because there is a general 
feeling that humanness (or animacy, i.e. human + nonhuman animal) is THE 
decisive factor in many cases (whether in animacy-scale effects or in 
nomification patters). But this is itself a claim which may not be 
correct. In Dravidian linguistics, there is a tradition of 
distinguishing a class of "rational" nouns or referents (thus explicitly 
including personified nonhumans), so maybe the treatment of humans and 
higher animals in these languages is just an effect of their rational 
nature.

Maybe for typological purposes, one could set up a notion of a 
"human-core class", i.e. a class of forms that contains all typical 
humans, and then ask for each language which other kinds of nouns or 
nominal referents a language puts in a human-core class if it has one 
(and also which kinds of atypical human referents it does not put in 
that class).

David's question would then be: Are there languages that put nouns or 
nominal referents in a human-core class based on their human-like shape? 
(though one would have to be careful to distinguish between shape and 
other human-like properties, e.g. active behaviour in the case of 
robots, and passive behaviour in the case of dolls)

Martin


On 26.11.18 20:27, David Gil wrote:
>
> I am looking for examples of exceptions to the animacy hierarchy that 
> are motivated by the shape or other spatial configurational properties 
> of the relevant referents.
>
> The animacy hierarchy is primarily of an ontological nature; shape 
> doesn't usually matter.A slug is animate even though its shape is 
> ill-defined and amorphous, while a stone statue is inanimate even if 
> it represents an identifiable person.
>
> What would such a shape-based exception to the animacy hierachy look 
> like?In Japanese (according to Wikipedia, I hope this is right), there 
> are two verbs of existence, /iru/ for animates, /aru/ for inanimates, 
> but /robotto/ ('robot') can occur with either of the two: while /iru/ 
> entails "emphasis on its human-like behavior", /aru/ entails "emphasis 
> on its status as a nonliving thing".This description seems to suggest 
> that it's the robot's sentience that is of relevance, not its human 
> shape: presumably, even if the robot assumed the form of a sphere with 
> blinking lights, if its behaviour were sufficiently humanlike it could 
> take /iru/ (speakers of Japanese: is this correct?).On the other hand, 
> I'm guessing that a human-like statue could never take /iru /(is this 
> correct?).So if my factual assumptions about Japanese are correct, the 
> distribution of /iru/ and /aru/ does not offer a shape-based exception 
> to the animacy hierarchy.A bona-fide shape-based exception to the 
> animacy hierarchy would be one in which all human-shaped objects — 
> robots, dolls, statues, whatever — behaved like humans with respect to 
> the relevant grammatical property.Or conversely, a case in which an 
> animate being that somehow managed to assume the form of a typical 
> inanimate object would be treated as inanimate.
>
> I would like to claim that such shape-based exceptions to the animacy 
> hierarchy simply do not exist, but I am running this past the 
> collective knowledge of LINGTYP members first, to make sure I'm not 
> missing out on anything.
>
> More generally, it seems to be the case that grammar doesn't really 
> care much about shapes.The closest thing to grammaticalized shape that 
> I can think of is numeral classifiers, which typically refer to 
> categories such as "elongated object", "small compact object", and so 
> forth.But these straddle the boundary between grammar and lexicon, 
> and, more importantly, are typically organized paradigmatically, 
> rather than hierarchically, as is the case for animacy categories.
> -- 
> David Gil
>
> Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution
> Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
> Kahlaische Strasse 10, 07745 Jena, Germany
>
> Email:gil at shh.mpg.de
> Office Phone (Germany): +49-3641686834
> Mobile Phone (Indonesia): +62-81281162816
>
>
>
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-- 
Martin Haspelmath (haspelmath at shh.mpg.de)
Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
Kahlaische Strasse 10	
D-07745 Jena
&
Leipzig University
Institut fuer Anglistik
IPF 141199
D-04081 Leipzig





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