Animacy & Topicality on a Scale of Cultural Context
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2014
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Swarthmore College. Dept. of Linguistics
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Thesis (B.A.)
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Abstract
What is animacy? Animacy is literally the "cognitive distinction between animate
and inanimate, and ... human and non-human" (Yamamoto 1999). However,
linguistically and for the purposes of this paper, animacy hierarchy in language is defined
by Thomas Payne as "a hierarchy of agent-worthiness (or by extension topic-worthiness
[ ... ] [which] is not grammaticalized in any given language, but neither is it a theoretical
model based on a pre-empirical notion of 'agent-worthiness.' Rather, it derives from a
survey of languages that rely, at least partially, on pragmatics to distinguish f Agentl from
[Patient]" (Payne 1997). In this paper I will support Payne's definition of animacy, and
his notion that animacies in language always function from left to right (higher to lower
animacy) in regards to agency and topic, unless grammatically marked. In other words,
an entity of lower animacy will never act upon an entity of higher animacy because it
defies this order, unless there is a specific method to grammatically mark this change. I
also argue that there is a spectrum of animacy in language, ranging from those languages
in which it is disregarded and not grammatically manifested, to those in which it is so
closely bound to cultural contexts that it necessitates grammatical markedness. To
explore this latter end of the scale, I will discuss at length the elaborate Navajo animacy
hierarchy and its inextricability from Navajo religion and world view. I will then use
Japanese and Hindi to demonstrate their intermediary position on the scale of animacy's
influence in grammar. These three languages provide examples of different ways of
connoting animacy, from word order, to affixes, to verbal morphology, as well as
different ways of defining its animacy hierarchy. These categories, differentiating
"animate" from "inanimate" and all levels in between, do not represent one universal
worldview, but rather reflect the views of individual cultures and thus are manifested
differently in each language.