animacyhierarkia

Animacy hierarchy, also known as the animacy scale or animacy gradient, is a linguistic concept that describes a ranked order of entities based on their perceived level of sentience, consciousness, or vitality. This hierarchy typically places humans at the top, followed by animals, then plants, and finally inanimate objects at the bottom. The concept suggests that speakers of a language tend to treat entities higher on the animacy scale differently in their grammar and discourse.

For instance, in many languages, animacy hierarchy influences grammatical phenomena such as pronoun case marking, verb agreement, and the formation of relative clauses. Entities higher on the scale might be more likely to be referred to with specific grammatical markers or be the preferred subject of verbs. This is often observed in how languages mark the direct object: more animate objects are sometimes marked differently than less animate ones.

The animacy hierarchy is not universal in its specifics but reflects a common cognitive tendency across languages. While the exact ordering can vary, the general principle of distinguishing between living and non-living things, and further differentiating within the living category based on perceived sentience, is widespread. It is a way for languages to encode a speaker's understanding of the world and the relative importance or agency assigned to different entities within it. Linguistic research uses the animacy hierarchy to understand cross-linguistic patterns and the cognitive underpinnings of language structure.