Animacy: animacy
| Values: | Anim | Inan |
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 cross-linguistically independent of gender, therefore it is encoded as a separate feature in UD and also in some Czech tagsets (e.g. Multext-East). 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 animacy as separate feature and instead defines four genders: masculine animate, masculine inanimate, feminine and neuter.
The following table demonstrates how masculine animate vs. inanimate inflection differs in singular genitive, dative, accusative and locative, and plural nominative/vocative. The differences are also projected to congruent adjectives and determiners; plural nominative is also projected to predicative participles (pánové zvítězili “gentlemen won” vs. vozy zvítězily “cars won”).
| Masc Anim | Masc Inan | |
| “this strong gentleman” | “this strong car” | |
| Sing Nom | tento silný pán | tento silný vůz |
| Sing Gen | tohoto silného pána | tohoto silného vozu |
| Sing Dat | tomuto silnému pánovi/pánu | tomuto silnému vozu |
| Sing Acc | tohoto silného pána | tento silný vůz |
| Sing Voc | silný pane | silný voze |
| Sing Loc | tomto silném pánovi/pánu | tomto silném vozu/voze |
| Sing Ins | tímto silným pánem | tímto silným vozem |
| Plur Nom | tito silní pánové/páni | tyto silné vozy |
| Plur Gen | těchto silných pánů | těchto silných vozů |
| Plur Dat | těmto silným pánům | těmto silným vozům |
| Plur Acc | tyto silné pány | tyto silné vozy |
| Plur Voc | silní pánové/páni | silné vozy |
| Plur Loc | těchto silných pánech | těchto silných vozech |
| Plur Ins | těmito silnými pány | těmito silnými vozy |
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.
Furthermore, some car brand/model names can in some cases take animate inflections (in any genre, not just children’s stories), despite being semantically inanimate. This is a mixed paradigm: The animate inflection (including adjective/determiner agreement) can be used in singular but not in plural, and even in singular it still alternates with the inanimate inflection: Koupil si starého trabanta (animate) vs. Koupil si starý trabant (inanimate) “He bought an old Trabant.”
Examples
Examples of masculine animate nouns:
- člověk “man”, ministr “minister”, prezident “president”, předseda “chairman”, ředitel “director”
- pes “dog”, kůň “horse”, vrabec “sparrow”, krokodýl “crocodile”, kapr “carp”
Inan: inanimate
Nouns that are not animate are inanimate.
Examples
Examples of masculine inanimate nouns:
- rok “year”, zákon “law”, stát “state”, případ “case”, milión “million”
- smrk “spruce”, dub “oak”, buk “beech”, heřmánek “camomile”, hřib “bolete”
Animacy in other languages: [bg] [cs] [hy] [ka] [qpm] [quc] [ru] [sl] [u] [uk] [urb]