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
- чоловік “man”, кіт “cat”, дитина “child”, комаха “insect”
Inan: inanimate
Nouns that are not animate are inanimate.
Examples
- рік “year”, закон “law”, хустка “kerchief”, озеро “lake”, мільйон “million”
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.
Animacy in other languages: [bg] [cs] [hy] [ka] [qpm] [quc] [ru] [sl] [u] [uk] [urb]