An animacy hierarchy within inanimate nouns: English corpus evidence from a prototypical perspective

Abstract

Existing animacy hierarchies, derived from either typological grammars or cognitive perception, appear to be elaborated exclusively within animate entities, leaving the inanimate nouns an undifferentiated class. However, it by no means indicates that all the inanimate nouns are equally inanimate without any hierarchic structure. According to the prototypical approach, animacy is a gradient hierarchy contingent on human egocentric assessment and interpretation. A thing's animacy depends on how much resemblance it bears to us, specifically, how many human prototype features it possesses. Based on this theory, our research investigated the animacy hierarchy within previously undifferentiated inanimate nouns. The method is to use predicate (typically finite) verbs as a linguistic externalization of human prototype features, which can then be quantified and weighted, based upon an actual corpus. The results attest to the presence of an animacy hierarchy of five inanimate categories. Collective nouns, spatial and temporal nouns, concrete nouns, psychological nouns, followed by other abstract nouns, rank in descending sequence along this hierarchy. Further syntactic exploration shows that this hierarchy can impact word order just as do existing animacy hierarchies. This study might shed some theoretical and methodological light on future animacy research.