A Preliminary Survey of Animacy Categories in Penobscot

For as long as there has been study of Algonquian languages, researchers have sought a means to predict which nouns fall into the class we call “animate,” and which fall into the class we call “inanimate.” Early on it was noticed that nouns referring to “beings” (human, animal, or supernatural) or “items often personified” (e.g. dolls, heavenly bodies) were all “animate”--hence the term. Since these nouns fit easily into the English definition of “animate,” this term has stuck, along with its antonym, “inanimate.” However, there has always been a problem with items which do not fit the English definition of “animate,” but which nonetheless are the referents of “animate” nouns. Some examples from Penobscot, an Eastern Algonquian language of Maine, include e~mjzn ‘spoon’, kz~wi ‘porcupine quill’, and wr~laman ‘ochre, red clay, vermilion; blood poisoning’. Conversely, many items considered “animate” in English are treated as “inanimates.” For example, the vast majority of terms for plants, bushes, and scrubby trees are inanimate in Penobscot, even as more substantial trees are uniformly animate. At first blush, then, membership in these two classes of nouns does not appear to be easily predictable. Most investigations into the predictability of animacy assignment fall into two groups. The majority of researchers recognize that animacy can sometimes be predicted semantically--but they then conclude that it is ultimately lexically determined, since too many apparently unpredictable cases exist. The second (and smaller) group holds that animacy is determined dynamically by speakers’ judgements about which items have a certain kind of “power,” and which do not. One idea for which there does seem to be a fair consensus is that “animate” is the marked category, and “inanimate” is the default category. That is, we need only determine the criteria for “animate”-ness; any noun failing to satisfy those criteria will automatically fall into the “inanimate” category. In this paper, I present the preliminary results of my survey of animacy as manifested in Penobscot. In Penobscot at least, it appears that animacy is determined largely by analogy between individual words, rather than by one elusive, overarching semantic feature that all members of the class “animate” share (cf. Dahlstrom (1995)). This one-word-to-one-word analogical model works as follows: if one knows that xawrdr\moti ‘cup, tumbler’ is animate, then the functionally similar fluid container po\xzye ‘bottle’ is predictably animate as well. Animacy-assigning analogies are not random; they seem mainly (but not exclusively) to be made along the semantic lines of intrinsic function and texture. Although exceptions exist, this characterization accounts for the overwhelming majority of animate nouns attested in the language. A note on terminology: in this paper, “animacy” refers to “the feature of whether a noun is animate or inanimate,” and “animateness” means “the feature of whether or not a noun is animate.” I also use the term “animate” mostly with the slightly restricted sense of the “not immediately obviously animate”---that is, my discussion will generally exclude the already very well-defined category of humans, animals, and personified and supernatural beings, along with large/substantial trees. I do so assuming that no matter what model one uses, these animate nouns are easily accounted for by simple descriptive rule. The “logically inanimate” animates are, as always, the main problem at hand. For the sake of completeness, however, here are some examples: