Animacy: animacy
Similarly to Gender (and to the African noun classes), animacy is usually a lexical feature of nouns and inflectional feature of other parts of speech (pronouns, adjectives, determiners, numerals, verbs) that mark agreement with nouns. It is independent of gender, therefore it is encoded separately in some tagsets (e.g. all the Multext-East tagsets). On the other hand, in Czech the (almost) only grammatical implications occur within the masculine gender, which is why the PDT tagset does not have animateness as separate feature and instead defines four genders: masculine animate, masculine inanimate, feminine and neuter. We follow the two-feature approach used in Multext-East (many languages) because it is safer.
Polish is special in that it also distinguishes grammatically human vs. non-human animates. It can be demonstrated by inflection of the example word który “which” (boldface forms differ from the middle row):
| gender | sg-nom | sg-gen | sg-dat | sg-acc | sg-ins | sg-loc | pl-nom | pl-gen | pl-dat | pl-acc | pl-ins | pl-loc |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| animate human | który | którego | któremu | którego | którym | którym | którzy | których | którym | których | którymi | których |
| animate non-human | który | którego | któremu | którego | którym | którym | które | których | którym | które | którymi | których |
| in-animate | który | którego | któremu | który | którym | którym | które | których | którym | które | którymi | których |
Anim: animate
Human beings, animals, fictional characters, names of professions etc. are all animate. Even nouns that are normally inanimate can be inflected as animate if they are personified. For instance, consider a children’s story about cars where cars live and talk as people; then the cars may become and be inflected as animates.
Nhum: animate but non-human
Attested in Polish. In languages where Nhum is used, Anim is
restricted to human beings (complement of Nhum).
Inan: inanimate
Nouns that are not animate are inanimate. (If Nhum is used, nouns
that are neither Anim nor Nhum are Inan.)
Animacy in other languages: [bg] [cs] [de] [el] [en] [es] [eu] [fa] [fr] [ga] [he] [hu] [it] [ja] [ko] [sv] [u]