Back Animacitat Catalan Камлăх-мĕнлĕх CV Animathed Danish Belebtheitshierarchie German Animéité French Élőség Hungarian 有生性 Japanese 유정성 Korean Gyvumas (kalbotyra) Lithuanian Fananana aina (fitsipiteny) Malagasy
 | This article includes a list of general references, but it lacks sufficient corresponding inline citations. (April 2009) |
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Animacy (antonym: inanimacy) is a grammatical and semantic feature, existing in some languages, expressing how sentient or alive the referent of a noun is.[1] Widely expressed, animacy is one of the most elementary principles in languages around the globe and is a distinction acquired as early as six months of age.[2]
Concepts of animacy constantly vary beyond a simple animate and inanimate binary; many languages function off an hierarchical general animacy scale that ranks animacy as a "matter of gradience".[3] Typically (with some variation of order and of where the cutoff for animacy occurs), the scale ranks humans above animals, then plants, natural forces, concrete objects, and abstract objects, in that order. In referring to humans, this scale contains a hierarchy of persons, ranking the first- and second-person pronouns above the third person, partly a product of empathy, involving the speaker and interlocutor.[3]
It is obvious that the ability to distinguish between animate and inanimate is very important from an evolutionary point of view. In order to survive, an animal must be able to quickly and accurately distinguish between its sexual partners, rivals, predators, animals that it eats, etc., and inanimate objects. As for people, the ability to distinguish between animate and inanimate arises in infancy, even before children have mastered speech.[4] Apparently, there is a brain mechanism responsible for this process. Thus, neurophysiological studies have experimentally shown[5] that this process includes two stages - categorization of objects by shape, followed by the second stage - activation of attention specifically to animate objects (the temporoparietal areas of the cortex are responsible for the first stage, and the frontal areas are responsible for the second).
- ^ Santazilia, Ekaitz (2022-11-14), Animacy and Inflectional Morphology across Languages, Brill, doi:10.1163/9789004513068, ISBN 978-90-04-51306-8, S2CID 256298064, retrieved 2024-02-07
- ^ Szewczyk, Jakub M.; Schriefers, Herbert (2010). "Is animacy special? ERP correlates of semantic violations and animacy violations in sentence processing". Brain Research. 1368: 208–221. doi:10.1016/j.brainres.2010.10.070. PMID 21029726. S2CID 33461799.
- ^ a b Yamamoto, Mutsumi (2006). Agency and impersonality: Their linguistic and cultural manifestations. Amsterdam: J. Benjamins Pub. Co. p. 36.
- ^ Spriet, Céline; Abassi, Etienne; Hochmann, Jean-Rémy; Papeo, Liuba (2022-02-22). "Visual object categorization in infancy". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 119 (8): e2105866119. doi:10.1073/pnas.2105866119. PMC 8872728. PMID 35169072.
- ^ Kozlovskiy, S.; Kashirin, V.; Glazkova, A. (2023-06-01). "Electrophysiological differences in perception of animate and inanimate objects". International Journal of Psychophysiology. 188: 116–117. doi:10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2023.05.297. ISSN 0167-8760.