Abstract
We show by means of a corpus study that the language used by the inanimate first person narrator in the novel Specht en zoon deviates from what we would expect on the basis of the fact that the narrator is inanimate, but at the same time also differs from the language of a human narrator in the novel De wijde blik on several linguistic dimensions. Whereas the human narrator is associated strongly with action verbs, preferring the Agent role, the inanimate narrator is much more limited to the Experiencer role, predominantly associated with cognition and sensory verbs. Our results show that animacy as a linguistic concept may be refined by taking into account the myriad ways in which an entity’s conceptual animacy may be expressed: we accept the conceptual animacy of the inanimate narrator despite its inability to act on its environment, showing this need not be a requirement for animacy.
References
Aissen, Judith. 1999. Markedness and subject choice in Optimality Theory. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 17. 673-711.10.1023/A:1006335629372Search in Google Scholar
Alber, Jan. 2016. Unnatural Narrative: Impossible worlds in fiction and drama. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.10.2307/j.ctt1d4v147Search in Google Scholar
van Bergen, Geertje. 2011. Who’s first and what’s next. Animacy and word order variation in Dutch language production. PhD thesis. Radboud University Nijmegen.Search in Google Scholar
Bernaerts, Lars, Marco Caracciolo, Luc Herman, Bart Vervaeck. 2014. The storied lives of non-human narrators. Narrative 22. 68-93.10.1353/nar.2014.0002Search in Google Scholar
Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, Ina, Matthias Schlesewsky. 2009. The role of prominence information in real time comprehension of transitive constructions: A cross-linguistic approach. Language and Linguistic Compass 3. 19-58.10.1111/j.1749-818X.2008.00099.xSearch in Google Scholar
Bouma, Gerlof. 2008. Starting a sentence in Dutch. A corpus study of subject- and object-fronting. PhD thesis. University of Groningen.Search in Google Scholar
Branigan, Holly. P., Martin J. Pickering, Mikihiro Tanaka. 2008. Contributions of animacy to grammatical function assignment and word order during production. Lingua 118. 172-208.10.1016/j.lingua.2007.02.003Search in Google Scholar
Cannizzaro, Courtney. 2012. Early word order and animacy. PhD thesis. University of Groningen.Search in Google Scholar
Comrie, Bernard. 1989. Language universals and linguistic typology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Search in Google Scholar
Cornelis, Louise. 1997. Passive and perspective. Amsterdam: Rodopi.10.1163/9789004484672Search in Google Scholar
Dahl, Östen. 2008. Animacy and egophoricity: Grammar, ontology and phylogeny. Lingua 118. 141-150.Search in Google Scholar
Dahl, Östen, Kari Fraurud. 1996. Animacy in grammar and discourse. In Fretheim, Thorstein, Jeanette Gundel (eds.), Reference and referent accessibility, 47-64. Amsterdam: Benjamins.10.1075/pbns.38.04dahSearch in Google Scholar
Dowty, David. 1991. Thematic proto-roles and argument selection. Language 67. 547-619.10.1353/lan.1991.0021Search in Google Scholar
Fagel, Suzanne, Ninke Stukker, Loes van Andel. 2012. Hoe telbaar is stijl? Een kwantitatieve analyse van observatie en participatie in de stijl van Arnon Grunberg [How countable is style? A quantitive analysis of observation and participation in the style of Arnon Grunberg]. Nederlandse Letterkunde. 178-203.10.5117/NEDLET2012.3.HOE_353Search in Google Scholar
Fauconnier, Stefanie. 2011. Differential Agent marking and animacy. Lingua 121. 533-547.10.1016/j.lingua.2010.10.014Search in Google Scholar
Fraurud, Kari. 1996. Cognitive ontology and NP form, In Fretheim, Thorstein, Jeanette Gundel (eds.), Reference and referent accessibility, 65-87. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.10.1075/pbns.38.05fraSearch in Google Scholar
Hendriks, Petra, Helen de Hoop, Monique Lamers. 2005. Asymmetries in language use reveal asymmetries in the grammar. In Dekker, Paul, Michael Franke (eds.), Proceedings of the 15th Amsterdam Colloquium, 113-118. Amsterdam: ILLC.Search in Google Scholar
Hogeweg, Lotte, Helen de Hoop. 2010. Children and transitivity: The subject-object asymmetry in a natural setting. In Brandt, Patrick, Marco García García (eds.), Transitivity. Form, meaning, acquisition, and processing, 143-160. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins.10.1075/la.166.06hogSearch in Google Scholar
de Hoop, Helen, Monique Lamers. 2006. Incremental distinguishability of subject and object. In Kulikov, Leonid, Andrej Malchukov, Peter de Swart (eds.), Case, valency and transitivity, 47-64. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.10.1075/slcs.77.17hooSearch in Google Scholar
Lamers, Monique, Helen de Hoop. 2014. Animate object fronting in Dutch: a production study. In MacWhinney, Brian, Andrej Malchukov, Edith Moravcsik (eds.), Competing motivations in grammar and usage, 42-53. Oxford: Oxford University Press.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198709848.003.0003Search in Google Scholar
Lestrade, Sander. 2010. The space of case. PhD thesis. Radboud University Nijmegen.Search in Google Scholar
Lowder, Matthew W., Peter C. Gordon. 2015. Natural forces as Agents: Reconceptualizing the Animate-Inanimate distinction. Cognition 136. 85-90.10.1016/j.cognition.2014.11.021Search in Google Scholar
Mak, Willem M., Wietske Vonk, Herbert Schriefers. 2006. Animacy in processing relative clauses: the hikers that rocks crush. Journal of Memory and Language 54. 466-490.10.1016/j.jml.2006.01.001Search in Google Scholar
Malchukov, Andrej. 2005. Case pattern splits, verb types and construction competition. In Amberber, Mengistu, Helen de Hoop (eds.), Competition and variation in natural languages: the case for case, 73-117. Amsterdam: Elsevier.10.1016/B978-008044651-6/50006-9Search in Google Scholar
Malchukov, Andrej. 2008. Animacy and asymmetries in differential case marking. Lingua 118. 203-221.10.1016/j.lingua.2007.02.005Search in Google Scholar
Nieuwland, Mante S., Jos J.A. van Berkum. 2006. When peanuts fall in love: N400 evidence for the power of discourse. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 18. 1098-1111.10.1162/jocn.2006.18.7.1098Search in Google Scholar
Nijhof, Annabel D., Roel M. Willems. 2015. Simulating fiction: individual differences in literature comprehension revealed with fMRI. PLoS ONE 10, e0116492.Search in Google Scholar
Øvrelid, Lilja. 2004. Disambiguation of grammatical functions in Norwegian: modeling variation in word order interpretations conditioned by animacy and definiteness. In Karlsson, Fred (ed.), Proceedings of the 20th Scandinavian Conference on Linguistics, Helsinki, January 7-9, 2004. Helsinki: University of Helsinki publications.Search in Google Scholar
Prat-Sala, Mercè, Holly P. Branigan. 2000. Discourse constraints on syntactic processing in language production: A crosslinguistic study in English and Spanish. Journal of Memory and Language 42. 168-182.10.1006/jmla.1999.2668Search in Google Scholar
Primus, Beatrice. 2012. Animacy, generalized semantic roles, and differential object marking. In Lamers, Monique, Peter de Swart (eds.), Case, word order and prominence: Interacting cues in language production and comprehension, 65-90. Dordrecht: Springer.10.1007/978-94-007-1463-2_4Search in Google Scholar
Rosenbach, Anette. 2008. Animacy and grammatical variation - Findings from the English genitive variation. Lingua 118. 151-171.10.1016/j.lingua.2007.02.002Search in Google Scholar
Siewierska, Anna. 2004. Person. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511812729Search in Google Scholar
de Swart, Peter, Helen de Hoop. 2018. Shifting Animacy. Theoretical Linguistics 44(1/2). 1-23.10.1515/tl-2018-0001Search in Google Scholar
de Swart, Peter, Monique Lamers, Sander Lestrade. 2008. Animacy, argument structure, and argument encoding. Lingua 118. 131-140.Search in Google Scholar
Szewczyk, Jakub, Herbert Schriefers. 2011. Is animacy special? ERP correlates of semantic violations and animacy violations in sentence processing. Brain Research 1368. 208-221.10.1016/j.brainres.2010.10.070Search in Google Scholar
Verhoeven, Elisabeth. 2014. Thematic prominence and animacy asymmetries. Evidence from a cross-linguistic production study. Lingua 143. 129-161.10.1016/j.lingua.2014.02.002Search in Google Scholar
Verhoeven, Elisabeth. 2015. Thematic asymmetries do matter! A corpus study of German word order. Journal of Germanic Linguistics 27. 45-104.10.1017/S147054271400021XSearch in Google Scholar
Viberg, Åke. 1983. The verbs of perception: a typological study. Linguistics 21. 123-162.10.1515/ling.1983.21.1.123Search in Google Scholar
Vogels, Jorrig, Emiel Krahmer, Alfons Maes. 2013. When a stone tries to climb up a slope: the interplay between lexical and perceptual animacy in referential choices. Frontiers in Psychology 4 (154).10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00154Search in Google Scholar
Whitt, Richard J. 2009. Auditory evidentiality in English and German: The case of perception verbs. Lingua 119. 1083-1095.10.1016/j.lingua.2008.11.001Search in Google Scholar
Yamomoto, Mutsumi. 1999. Animacy and reference: A cognitive approach to corpus linguistics. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.10.1075/slcs.46Search in Google Scholar
© by Thijs Trompenaars, et al., published by De Gruyter
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License.