Animacy Restrictions: A Window on the Interplay between Language and Meaning (Phase 1D)

Although it has long been recognised in many different fields that animacy plays a part in grammar, its precise grammatical role, particularly in Indo-European languages, is still poorly understood, and controversy remains as to how animacy should be addressed in formal linguistic theory. One phenomenon where animacy may play a role is object drop; there is some evidence that sentences without an overt object may be more acceptable if the subject is animate (e.g. ‘John is cleaning’) than if the subject is inanimate (e.g. ‘The rain is cleaning’). However, little quantitative research exists to illustrate the nature and extent of such phenomena.