Animacy and Syntactic Structure : Fronted NPs in English

It has long been known that whether the referent of a nominal is animate or not can be important in determining its syntactic or morphological realization. To describe this effect, researchers have proposed a number of hierarchies. The original hierarchy due to Silverstein (1976) conflates definiteness distinctions, animacy distinctions and person distinctions into one ordering called the ‘animacy hierarchy’. We follow Aissen (2003) (based on Croft 1988) in distinguishing separate hierarchies because they refer to different aspects of entity representation within language: the definiteness dimension is linked to the status of the entity as already known or not yet known at a particular point in the discourse, the person hierarchy depends on the participants within the discourse, and the animacy status is an inherent characteristic of the entities referred to. We moreover assume that the traditional definiteness hierarchy, which looks at the morphological marking of the nominal, is in fact a proxy for an ordering according to information status (see below). Each of these three aspects, however, contributes to making entities more or less salient or accessible at a particular point in the discourse. As long as one’s attention is limited to the distinction between grammatical and ungrammatical sentences, the importance of the animacy hierarchy is mainly relevant for languages with a richer morphology than English. In such languages animacy distinctions can influence