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Animacy is a grammatical and semantic principle expressed in language based on how sentient or alive the referent of a noun is. Widely expressed, animacy is one of the most elementary principles in languages around the globe, and is a distinction acquired as early as 6 months of age. Concepts of animacy constantly vary beyond a simple animate vs. inanimate binary; many languages function off of a hierarchical General Animacy Scale that ranks animacy as a “matter of gradience”. Typically (with some variation of order and of where the cutoff for animacy occurs) the scale ranks humans above animals, then plants, natural forces, concrete objects, and abstract objects, in that order. In referring to humans, this scale contains a Hierarchy of ‘Persons’, ranking first and second person pronouns above third person – partly a product of empathy, involving the speaker and interlocutor.〔 Additionally, the hierarchy tends to place singular persons over plural (as seen in the heavy difference between “I regret to inform you” and “We regret to inform you”) – though this carries exceptions (such as thousands of people signing a petition).〔 ==Examples== The distinction between on the one hand, and ''it'' on the other, is a distinction in animacy in English and in many Indo-European languages. The same can be said about distinction between ''who'' and ''what''. Some languages, such as Turkish, Spoken Finnish and Spanish do not distinguish between ''s/he'' and ''it''. In Finnish there is a distinction in animacy between ''hän'' "he/she" and ''se'' "it", however in Spoken Finnish ''se'' also can have the meaning "he/she". English shows a similar lack of distinction between ''they'' animate and ''they'' inanimate in plural, but does as shown above have such a distinction in singular. There is another example of how animacy plays some role in English. For example, the higher animacy a referent has, the less preferable it is to use the preposition ''of'' for possession, as follows (this can also be interpreted in terms of alienable versus inalienable possession): * ''My face'' is correct, while * * ''The man's face'' and ''the face of the man'' are both correct, and the former is preferred. * ''The clock's face'' and ''the face of the clock'' are both correct, and the latter is preferred. Examples of languages in which an animacy hierarchy is important include the Mexican language Totonac and the Southern Athabaskan languages (such as Western Apache and Navajo), whose animacy hierarchy has been the subject of intense study. The Tamil language has a noun classification based on animacy. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「animacy」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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