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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...
In this paper, we consider a number of phenomena in English, and other languages (Italian, Greek, Russian) involving external arguments where prima facie animacy seems to constrain grammaticality. Our discussion comes to the conclusions that, at least in the cases under analysis, a more appropriate notion should be evoked, i.e. the notion of teleological capability and that the inherent abilities...
How does animacy affect argument structure and the encoding of arguments? After briefly discussing the role of animacy in language, this introduction provides summaries of the contributions to this special issue.
Bresnan et al. (2007) show that a statistical model can predict United States (US) English speakers’ syntactic choices with ‘give’-type verbs extremely accurately. They argue that these results are consistent with probabilistic models of grammar, which assume that grammar is quantitive, and learned from exposure to other speakers. Such a model would also predict syntactic differences across time and...
In this paper we report the results of an elicited imitation task on dative case marking in non-canonical double object constructions with 22 German children (3;9–6;8). The aim was to test the proficiency of the children's grammar and to see which strategies they use to produce ditransitive sentences in which the direct object precedes the indirect object. The analysis of the children's utterances/imitations...
We examine how the relationship between animacy and syntactic structure might be explained in terms of an influence of animacy on the psychological processes that underlie the construction of syntactic structure during language production. In this account, animacy exerts its influence through its correlation with conceptual accessibility, or how easily a concept is retrieved from memory. Animate entities...
The present paper presents a cross-linguistic overview of animacy effects in (differential) case marking, and provides an explanation for the attested patterns in terms of two competing case marking strategies. It is argued that the complexity of animacy effects in differential case marking is due to the fact that some of these patterns result from the differentiating function of case marking, while...
Some results of earlier work on animacy by Kari Fraurud and the author are reviewed, demonstrating the close relationship between (i) the role of animacy as a determinant of grammatical rules and the choice between types of referential expressions, and (ii) statistical regularities in discourse. The idea that animacy is an ontological category is developed further. In the final section, the phylogenetic...
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