A Study Of Animacy Hierarchy In English

As one of the most important linguistic categories, animacy has cross-language effects on many linguistic phenomena, which has attracted a lot of discussions from various linguistic disciplines. However, previous studies have not paid much attention to the essence of animacy. The animacy hierarchy proposed therein is limited to nouns and pronouns, and lack of systematic analyses and supportive data. Hence, this research is intended to explore the theoretical issues of animacy, based on which, to propose a feasible analytical method of animacy hierarchy, and then to expand its researching area by using authentic data.This research proposes that, animacy has empirical, prototypical, universal and dynamic properties. Animacy in essence is a hierarchical category with human beings as the prototype. The perception of animacy is human-centered cognition from human’s own perspective. This cognition is embodied and rooted in evolution, therefore has cross-cultural universality. The animacy could be dynamic in different culture or context. This research has further extracted eight prototype features and their weights, which serves as an effective analytical frame for animacy hierarchy.Based on this viewpoint, this research expands the concept of animacy from two dimensions. On the horizontal dimension, the animacy hierarchy is extended from nouns and pronouns to verbs and adjectives, and then from the lexical level onto the collocational and textual level. On the vertical dimension, the animacy hierarchy is extended from static hierarchy to dynamic hierarchy. This research is based on the BNC corpus and Crown/CLOB corpora, which exhibits a high reliability and representativeness.This research yields the follow findings:1) There are static animacy hierarchies on the lexical level. Different word classes have different hierarchical distributions: nouns have the "sandglass" distribution in type and "butterfly" distribution in token; verbs have the "olive" distribution in type and "whipping top" distribution in token; adjectives have the "pyramid" distribution in both type and token. Besides, different hierarchies have different prototype features:the higher on the hierarchy, the more features it bears, and more weights of its features.2) There are both static and dynamic hierarchies on the collocational and textual level. The dynamic property of the animacy hierarchy is due to the following four mechanisms:metonymy, metaphor, determiners, and multi-hierarchic nature. There are nine collocations which have higher dynamicity, therefore more likely to have the dynamic animacy. Different genres have different animacy hierarchy and dynamicity:Fictional texts have the highest animacy and lowest dynamicity, while academic texts have the lowest animacy and highest dynamicity.The findings of this research can be widely applied to the following disciplines: text classification, automatic parsing, machine translation, metonymy/metaphor identifation, sematic error identifation, and interlanguage analysis, etc.