Animacy and grammatical variation—Findings from English genitive variation

Abstract

This paper gives an overview on some notorious questions pertaining to the status of animacy in grammatical variation, exemplified by the specific case of English genitive variation (e.g. the boy's exhaustion versus the exhaustion of the boy). Empirical evidence from previous research will be invoked to address issues such as the ‘fluid’ nature of animacy in grammatical choices (i.e. its dependency from conceptualization), the interaction of animacy with other factors such as topicality/definiteness and weight, the locus of the observed word order effects of animacy (syntactic prominence versus firstness) and the parallel effects of animacy in language-internal and cross-linguistic variation.