[Lingtyp] animacy hierarchy: exceptions based on shape

[Östen Dahl]

David is right when he says that animacy is primarily ontological and what is relevant to it is "sentience" rather than shape. But animacy can be manifested in grammar in at least two different ways. One is the capacity of appearing in roles that presuppose sentience, such as 'agent' and 'experiencer', and as a result of this, in syntactic slots that express these roles. The other is in determining the use of grammatical categories such as gender. These two kinds of manifestations are sometimes in conflict with each other. In particular, properties such as agenthood may well be ascribed to entities that are referred to by nouns with a gender normally reserved for inanimate objects. Consider the case of statues. The reason why we might want to regard a statue as animate is not primarily that it is shaped like a human being but that we either take it to represent a human or to be capable of acting and perceiving. In Mozart's opera Don Giovanni, the protagonist interacts with a statue representing the Commendatore, a man he has earlier killed. I looked on the Internet for synopses of the opera in some European languages to see how the statue was referred to. Here is a relevant example in Polish:

(1) Don Giovanni zaprasza posąg na kolację. Posąg przyjmuje zaproszenie.
'Don Giovanni invites the statue to supper. The statue accepts the invitation.'

We can see in the second sentence that agenthood -- and thus animacy -- is attributed to the statue, the word "posąg" 'statue' being the subject of the verb meaning 'to invite'. Nevertheless the first occurrence of "posąg" does not get the ending that a masculine animate noun should have in direct object position but is rather treated as an inanimate, the form of which is identical in subject and object position. In English texts, the statue is variously referred to by "it" and "he", with some predominance for the former, but in at least one case the author displays some ambivalence and gives both forms:

(2) To show his disdain and lack of fear of the statue, Don Giovanni invites it/him to supper.

This probably has to do with the fact that English pronominal gender tends to be determined by the character of the referent rather than by the lexical gender of the antecedent. 

- östen