Abstract
AbstractAnimacy influences the patterns of subject-verb agreement marking in many languages, including Persian and Inari Saami. In Persian, animate plural subjects trigger plural agreement on the verb, whereas inanimate subjects may or may not trigger agreement. The variation is governed by factors such as personification, agency and distributivity. In Inari Saami, verbs fully agree with human subjects and verbs partially agree with inanimate subjects. Verbs may or may not agree with subjects referring to animals. We argue that the intricate interaction between biological animacy and grammatical agreement in these two languages warrants careful consideration of the tripartite distinction between biological animacy in the world, our conceptualization of animacy and formal animacy features in the grammar.
Highlights
Animacy influences the patterns of subject-verb agreement marking in many languages, including Persian and Inari Saami
We argue that the intricate interaction between biological animacy and grammatical agreement in these two languages warrants careful consideration of the tripartite distinction between biological animacy in the world, our conceptualization of animacy and formal animacy features in the grammar
We argue that an account of animacy in grammatical systems demands careful consideration of the tripartite distinction between grammatical animacy, our cognitive construal of animacy, and animacy ‘in the world’
Summary
Reference to the animacy hierarchy has been claimed to be linguistically universal, but not all languages with grammatical animacy are sensitive to all the distinctions on the hierarchy Instead, it is an implicational hierarchy: for example, if a human non-pronominal noun triggers agreement, proper names and pronouns will, too. We could try to argue that the two (the grammar and the world) are intrinsically connected and that grammatical animacy directly reflects biological animacy This approach does not seem promising since it would predict much less cross-linguistic variation than we find. Animacy can become integrated into the linguistic system, for example as agreement or case morphology When this happens, the distinction is part of a formal system that only has access to the entities and activities in the world that it describes through the human construal of “what is out there”. The mapping between language and the world is not direct
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