International Journal of Language and Culture - Volume 5, Issue 2, 2018

In English, the lexicon is one of the many areas affected by the asymmetry in the treatment of humans and inanimates. The study focuses on compounds. We compare compounds denoting human animates to those denoting inanimates. We find that there are proportionately few compounds for humans, and that this small proportion reveals a tendency for human animate nouns to be more opaque than nouns for inanimates. We propose that this is due to the way we conceptualize humans, i.e. as more than the sum of their parts. Humans resist transparent denominations because reducing a person to one characteristic amounts to ignoring his or her essential complexity. We take this to be a manifestation of anthropocentrism in language. Moreover, when human animate nouns are compounds (in spite of their tendency to be opaque), they exhibit two semantic characteristics that are not shared by inanimate nouns. The first one is that they tend to be derogatory. This again indicates that humans cannot easily be reduced to one characteristic. If they are, denominations tend to be negatively loaded. The second one is that they often involve the representation of a personal relationship (for example, a paper boy delivers newspapers, i.e. comes to someone’s place). Transparency is therefore meaningful.

In natural languages, personal nouns (e.g., madame, ministre) are used very frequently and it is usually not very difficult to identify and interpret them in texts. If one tries to define them more precisely, however, one is confronted with a series of challenges. This contribution gives an overview of several types of difficulties that can be observed when trying to establish distinctions between personal nouns and other words. They are related to lexical differences between (personal) nouns and (personal) names, the referential boundaries of humanness, some morphological and semantic properties of French personal names, their syntactic behavior as personal nouns in French as well as the types of predications that may be used in order to distinguish between personal noun use and other uses. 1

In the children’s film Toy Story, toys spring to life when their human owners are away, creating an alternative world of transferred animacy relations signalled by visual and linguistic cues. The storylines and characters explore the nature of animacy and relationships between conspecifics and ‘others’. Our analysis focuses on the use of referring expressions over the course of the narrative, as they reflect the animacy of their referents. We relate these findings to well-established scales of animacy which link our perception of the world to the categories imposed by language. We find that, as predicted by models of animacy proposed by Dahl (2008) and Yamamoto (1999) , among others, shifts in reference – specifically from common noun to proper noun to pronoun, and from collective to individuated referents – reflect characters’ shifting conceptualisation of, and empathy with, each other. We argue that referring expressions are used at key points in the film script to subtly mediate accessible cues to animacy like eyes, speech and motion, and to guide viewers’ empathies and allegiances, extending our understanding of animacy beyond ordinary anthropocentrism.

This paper explores various ways in which contemporary British English depicts degrees of animacy among nonhuman animals, and demonstrates the anthropocentric qualities of much discourse about animals. The first section reviews discussions of animacy in relevant research literature, highlighting how these often take for granted a categorical distinction between humans and other animals, before demonstrating how both corpus-assisted approaches to discourse analysis and developments in the analysis of animacy point to a more complex picture. The second section discusses the implications of recent work in social theory for understanding organisms, and their degrees of animacy, from the perspective of networks rather than hierarchies. The third section of the paper presents analyses of an electronically stored corpus of language about animals. Three analyses of naming terms, descriptors and verbal patterns associated with various non-human animals illustrate a range of ways in which their animacy is denoted and connoted. They also demonstrate the influence of discourse type and human purpose on depictions of animals and assumptions about their animacy.

This paper explores linguistic egocentrism in English through the lens of virtual performatives, i.e. self-referential stand-alone predications in the third person singular present tense through which users perform virtual action or emotion. The focus is on microblogging for apparently recreational purposes, where visibility, rather than reciprocity, must be a primary concern. Findings show that the common or garden virtual performative consistently relying on an externalized self occasionally turns into a variant where the self is subsequently reassumed, and then again possibly re-externalized within the same construction. The syntactic and discursive systematicity manifest in these constructions forbids treating them as erroneous. The paper discusses the benefits of this way of externalizing and optionally reassuming self, through fluctuation between third-person and first-person references, and touches upon metapragmatic awareness and logophoricity. In creating digital culture, virtual performatives point to users’ pragmatic adaptation of their public, social self to environments manifesting a high degree of context collapse.

Perception verbs prototypically occur with a grammatical subject NP referring to a person. However, see and witness also license an inanimate grammatical subject, more precisely a spatial or temporal setting, in a “setting-subject construction” ( Langacker 1991 , 2008 ). The present study addresses this kind of variation, and demonstrates how the two alternate constructions reveal shifts from an egocentric perspective to an anthropocentric perspective. It sets out to accomplish three main goals: first, to establish whether each construction aligns perfectly with one particular perspective; second, to identify the semantic and syntactic characteristics of setting-subject constructions and explain how an inanimate subject NP can be favored over a human subject NP; third, to determine what can motivate speakers’ choices between the two alternate constructions licensed by see and witness. To achieve this, a qualitative, corpus-based analysis is carried out, which helps to understand to what extent the grammatical coding embodies a specific way of viewing the scene. First, the cognitive theoretical concepts (e.g., the Extended Animacy Hierarchy ( Croft, 2003 ), egocentric and canonical viewing arrangements, cognitive schemas and models) that are helpful for the proper characterization of the two structures are presented, as well as the methodology employed to collect data for the present study. I then focus on prototypical, human subject NP constructions which reveal either an egocentric or an anthropocentric point of view of the scene. Finally, setting-subject constructions are addressed: not only are the characteristics of such structures highlighted but also the parameters and factors that contribute to their occurrence are identified. The study shows that such constructions convey the conceptualizer’s assessment of a situation, as the viewing relationship is construed subjectively. A setting-subject construction thus reveals a perspective that indirectly turns out to be more anthropocentric than ‘setting-centric’, as the inanimate locative subject, ranking at the bottom of the Animacy hierarchy, winds up alluding to any possible human being, including the speaker, the addressee and the Other.

The philosophical idea of anthropocentrism viewing human beings as the most significant entities has been put forward in various metaphor studies within cognitive linguistics. As Talmy (2002) claims, people choose to animate a very large part of their reality and this happens due to embodiment, as Lakoff (1987) , and Lakoff and Johnson (1999) argue. Anthropocentricity can also be explained by Croft’s Extended Animacy Hierarchy system ( 2002 ) in terms of human beings outranking animate and inanimate entities, strongly implying that inanimate entities tend to be perceived as inferior. However, this paper argues that anthropocentrism is bidirectional, since not only do we ascribe human or animate qualities to inanimate objects or phenomena, but we also tend to “de-animate” human beings by attributing inanimate qualities to them. This paper further explores the idea of anthropocentricity by focusing on the metaphorical conceptualization of issues concerning the euro adoption in 2015 and the refugee crisis in 2015–2016, two real-life phenomena that have significantly affected social life in Lithuania. The paper thus aims to investigate how animation of the euro and de-animation of refugees is metaphorically conceptualized in the Lithuanian media and what rhetorical implications arise from this. The research is conducted within the framework of Critical Metaphor Analysis ( Charteris-Black, 2005/2011 , 2014 ; Musolff, 2004 ; Hart 2010 , etc.), which suggests that metaphors are used as an argumentative tool seeking to manipulate the audience. The paper therefore argues that the animation of the euro and “de-animation” of refugees carry serious rhetorical implications and reveal the attitudes of society towards the phenomena analyzed.