Animacy effects in inflectional morphology: a typological survey

Abstract

This dissertation aims at providing a monograph devoted exclusively to the effects of animacy in inflectional morphology. In order to carry out this work, on the one hand, some methodological decisions about sampling and data collection have been made and, on the other, based on an extensive literature review, a theoretical definition of animacy, its behavior and scope has been sought.Thereafter, a descriptive and comparative crosslinguistic typology of animacy effects in inflectional morphology has been carried out, based on data from more than 350 languages all over the world. This work focuses on three main aspects: The morphological (and phonological) techniques that are crosslinguistically employed to encode animacy, the grammatical categories that can be affected by animacy, and the grammatical features whose realization is sensitive to animacy-based distinctions.