Animation hierarchy
The animacy hierarchy (. AfterSilverstein 1976, the English name animacy hierarchy is sometimes used in German-speaking) is one of the hierarchies in language typology , with the help of which individual languages grammatical phenomena can be described systematically:
| general nouns | ||||||
|
1st person pronouns |
2nd person pronouns |
3rd person demonstratives and pronouns |
Proper names | human | animates | inanimate |
This hierarchy comes e.g. B. in the grammatical phenomenon of split ergativity , but can be relevant in addition to the definiteness - depending on the language - for the differential object marking (DOM).
Depending on the language, a certain case changes from a certain point in the hierarchy - marking with another or with a zero marking. The further to the left a noun is classified, the "livelier" the referent of the noun is and the higher its rank in the hierarchy.
See also
- Animation category (animation or non-animation)
literature
- Bernard Comrie : Language Universals and Linguistic Typology , 2nd Ed., The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1989, ISBN 0-226-11433-3 , chap. 9: Animacy, pp. 185-200.
- Michael Silverstein: Hierarchy of features and ergativity . In: Robert MW Dixon (Ed.): Grammatical categories in Australian languages . Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, Canberra 1976, pp. 112-171.