animacy

English

Etymology

From animate +‎ -cy.

Noun

animacy (usually uncountable, plural animacies)

  1. (biology) The state of being alive.
    Antonym: inanimacy
    • 2011, Seppo Kittilä, Katya Västi, Jussi Ylikoski, Case, Animacy and Semantic Roles‎[1], page 6:
      These may differ radically in their linguistic animacy, as briefly discussed above, without this having any consequences for their biological animacy.
  2. (linguistics) In some languages, the characteristic of a noun, dependent on its living or sentient nature, which affects grammatical features (it can modify verbs used with the noun, affect the noun's declension, etc.).

Translations

Anagrams

This article is issued from Wiktionary. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.