Animacy restrictions : a window on the interplay between language and meaning

The role of animacy in shaping grammatical structures has been emphasised by theorists in different fields (e.g., typologists, syntacticians, semanticists, psycholinguists). Yet, unlike other related features such as thematic roles (agents vs causers), the precise role of animacy in grammar is controversial and to a certain extent inadequately addressed in formal linguistic theory. Animacy has been mostly discussed with respect to polysynthetic/agglutivative languages, where its effects seem more clearly distinguishable, while its role in Indo-European languages is still fairly undocumented. The project will address this gap attempting to understand the relative role of animacy as a grammatical vs conceptual feature.