Animacy (antonym: inanimacy) is a grammatical and semantic feature, existing in some languages, expressing how sentient or alive the referent of a noun is. [1]

Animacy is one of the most elementary principles in many languages, and is a distinction understood at a very early age. Slavic languages that have case, including Russian, have a complex hierarchy of …

May 23, 2024 · Animacy, in quite a few languages, is the classification of nouns, and the things these words refer, based on the degree to which they are “alive” or animate. Some languages simply …

Define animacy. animacy synonyms, animacy pronunciation, animacy translation, English dictionary definition of animacy. tr.v. an·i·mat·ed , an·i·mat·ing , an·i·mates 1. To give life to; fill with life: the …

May 10, 2023 · This discussion illustrates the importance of animacy in determining the main types of Verbs in Plains Cree. When there is only one participant (i.e. intransitive verbs), that sole participant …

Animacy functions as a subgender through which noun cases intersect in a phenomenon called syncretism, which here can be either nominative-accusative or genitive-accusative.

Nov 6, 2025 · (linguistics) In some languages, the characteristic of a noun, dependent on its living or sentient nature, which affects grammatical features (it can modify verbs used with the noun, affect …

There are two meanings listed in OED's entry for the noun animacy. See ‘Meaning & use’ for definitions, usage, and quotation evidence.

Animacy (antonym: inanimacy) is a grammatical and semantic feature, existing in some languages, expressing how sentient or alive the referent of a noun is.

Similarly to Gender (and to the African noun classes), animacy is usually a lexical feature of nouns and inflectional feature of other parts of speech (pronouns, adjectives, determiners, numerals, verbs) that …