Abstract
Several studies suggest that referential choices are influenced by animacy. On the one hand, animate referents are more likely to be mentioned as subjects than inanimate referents. On the other hand, animate referents are more frequently pronominalized than inanimate referents. These effects have been analyzed as effects of conceptual accessibility. In this paper, we raise the question whether these effects are driven only by lexical concepts, such that referents described by animate lexical items (e.g., “toddler”) are more accessible than referents described by inanimate lexical items (e.g., “shoe”), or can also be influenced by context-derived conceptualizations, such that referents that are perceived as animate in a particular context are more accessible than referents that are not. In two animation-retelling experiments, conducted in Dutch, we investigated the influence of lexical and perceptual animacy on the choice of referent and the choice of referring expression. If the effects of animacy are context-dependent, entities that are perceived as animate should yield more subject references and more pronouns than entities that are perceived as inanimate, irrespective of their lexical animacy. If the effects are tied to lexical concepts, entities described with animate lexical items should be mentioned as the subject and pronominalized more frequently than entities described with inanimate lexical items, irrespective of their perceptual animacy. The results show that while only lexical animacy appears to affect the choice of subject referent, perceptual animacy may overrule lexical animacy in the choice of referring expression. These findings suggest that referential choices can be influenced by conceptualizations based on the perceptual context.
Highlights
Throughout the languages of the world, the influence of animacy turns up in numerous linguistic choices
The present study investigates the interplay between the animacy associated with lexical concepts, and the perceived animacy based on the referent’s movements in Dutch spoken language production
In descriptions of the transitive event in the animations, which involved an interaction between the target figure and the two competitor figures, the target figure’s lexical animacy, but not its perceptual animacy, influenced www.frontiersin.org
Summary
Throughout the languages of the world, the influence of animacy turns up in numerous linguistic choices. Passive sentences are more frequent when the patient role is taken up by an animate entity (McDonald et al, 1993; Van Nice and Dietrich, 2003a). This is illustrated by the preference in English for the sentence in (1a) over the one in (1b) (Prat-Sala and Branigan, 2000). The same held when grammatical roles were reversed, such as in (2b), suggesting that the effect of animacy on pronominalization is independent of grammatical function They found that animacy affected the choice of referent: participants were more likely to refer to the animate NP than to the inanimate NP in their continuations
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