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Animacy: animacy

Similarly to Gender, animacy is a lexical feature of nouns and inflectional feature of other parts of speech that mark agreement with nouns. It is independent of gender, therefore it is encoded separately in most tagsets (e.g. all the Multext-East tagsets).

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.

Examples of animate nouns:

Inan: inanimate

Nouns that are not animate are inanimate.

Examples of inanimate nouns:

Adjectives and determiners in the accusative case have different fors depending on animacy of the nouns they modify.

For certain Ukrainian word groups it is also possible to use alternative animate flections for inanimate nouns and inanimate flections for animate nouns. This phenomenon is only possible for the accusative case. Sometimes, although not in all situations, this switch (inanimisation or animisation) has a colloquial stylistic effect. Adjectives and determiners agree with such forms. A special layered feature Animacy[gram] is used to record such uses. See ref. for examples.

Treebank Statistics (UD_Ukrainian)

This feature is universal. It occurs with 2 different values: Anim, Inan.

397 tokens (24%) have a non-empty value of Animacy. 291 types (41%) occur at least once with a non-empty value of Animacy. 243 lemmas (40%) occur at least once with a non-empty value of Animacy. The feature is used with 3 part-of-speech tags: NOUN (258; 15% instances), PRON (88; 5% instances), PROPN (51; 3% instances).

NOUN

258 NOUN tokens (100% of all NOUN tokens) have a non-empty value of Animacy.

The most frequent other feature values with which NOUN and Animacy co-occurred: Number=EMPTY (179; 69%).

NOUN tokens may have the following values of Animacy:

Paradigm модельAnimInan
Case=Accмодель
Case=NomМодель

Animacy seems to be lexical feature of NOUN. 99% lemmas (188) occur only with one value of Animacy.

PRON

88 PRON tokens (58% of all PRON tokens) have a non-empty value of Animacy.

The most frequent other feature values with which PRON and Animacy co-occurred: Case=Nom (51; 58%), Gender=EMPTY (51; 58%), Person=EMPTY (49; 56%), Number=EMPTY (49; 56%).

PRON tokens may have the following values of Animacy:

Animacy seems to be lexical feature of PRON. 100% lemmas (16) occur only with one value of Animacy.

PROPN

51 PROPN tokens (100% of all PROPN tokens) have a non-empty value of Animacy.

The most frequent other feature values with which PROPN and Animacy co-occurred: Gender=Masc (37; 73%), Case=Nom (33; 65%).

PROPN tokens may have the following values of Animacy:

Paradigm БогданAnimInan
Case=GenБогдана
Case=NomБогдан

Animacy seems to be lexical feature of PROPN. 97% lemmas (37) occur only with one value of Animacy.

Relations with Agreement in Animacy

The 10 most frequent relations where parent and child node agree in Animacy: NOUN –[nmod]–> NOUN (15; 68%), NOUN –[appos]–> PROPN (6; 75%), NOUN –[conj]–> NOUN (6; 100%), NOUN –[appos]–> NOUN (5; 71%), PROPN –[remnant]–> PROPN (3; 100%), PROPN –[name]–> PROPN (3; 75%), PROPN –[appos]–> NOUN (3; 75%), PROPN –[list]–> NOUN (2; 100%), PRON –[vocative]–> PROPN (1; 100%), NOUN –[dobj]–> NOUN (1; 100%).

Animacy in other languages: [bg] [cs] [de] [el] [en] [es] [eu] [fa] [fr] [ga] [he] [hu] [it] [ja] [ko] [sv] [u]