Animacy effects in Tamil

Abstract

Animacy is reflected in multiple grammatical phenomena in Tamil. Several of these phenomena (e.g., accusative case marking and verbal agreement) reflect a distinction between humans and others, while locative case marking reflects a distinction between animates and inanimates. This paper describes the relevant phenomena, and proposes an analysis in terms of syntactic features in Lexical-Functional Grammar. The paper also raises questions about differences among animacy systems and suggests that some differences regarding cut-off points in the animacy hierarchy are due to the multifaceted nature of animacy.