Why “River” is more Animate than “Cancer”: Explaining Some Unusual Cases of Animacy in Latin

Authors

  • E. V. Zheltova St Petersburg State University

Abstract

The article deals with some peripheral phenomena concerning category of animacy, i. e. nouns without strict correlation between biological and grammatical animacy. Using the PHI-5 electronic data base, the author analyses different groups of such nouns in Latin, comparing them with relevant groups in Russian and some other languages, the results being presented in 5 tables. The general conclusions to be drawn from this study are: animacy in Latin is dynamic and gradual category, its periphery is wider than in Russian, some non-standard phenomena can be explained as a result of a competition between different parameters, i. e. grammar, semantics and logics.

Keywords:

peripheral phenomena of animacy, Latin language, competition between language parameters

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References

Литература

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References

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Croft U. Typology and Universals. S. l.: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Luraghi S. The origin of the Proto-Indo-European gender system: Typological considerations. Folia Linguistica. 2011. Vol. 45/2. Pp. 435–464.

Silverstein M. Hierarchy of features and ergativity. Grammatical Categories in Australian languages. Canberra, 1976. Pp. 112–171.

Swart P. de, Lamers M., Lestrade S. Animacy, argument structure, and argument encoding. Lingua. 2008. Vol. 118. Pp. 131–140.

Yamamoto M. Animacy and Reference: A Cognitive Approach to Corpus Linguistics. Amsterdam (Phil.), John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1999.

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Published

2015-12-10

How to Cite

Zheltova, E. (2015). Why “River” is more Animate than “Cancer”: Explaining Some Unusual Cases of Animacy in Latin. Philologia Classica, 10, 245–266. Retrieved from https://philclass.spbu.ru/article/view/7612

Issue

Vol. 10 (2015)

Section

II. Latin Language and Literature

License

Articles of "Philologia Classica" are open access distributed under the terms of the License Agreement with Saint Petersburg State University, which permits to the authors unrestricted distribution and self-archiving free of charge.