animacy in English

English grammaticalises animacy in one place only: the choice among paired closed class words. The relative pronoun who takes a human antecedent and which takes a non-human one, and the wrong choice is ungrammatical rather than merely odd. The interrogative pair who and what divides the same way, as do the indefinite pairs somebody and something, anybody and anything, nobody and nothing. In each pair the animacy of the referent decides which word the speaker must reach for, so the ranking is encoded in the form selected and not merely reflected in it.

Everywhere else the language ignores it. No noun inflects for a point on the scale. No determiner or adjective varies with it. There is no differential marking of the direct object, so a clause naming a human patient and a clause naming an inanimate one have the same shape and the same word order, which is the sharpest divergence from a language that puts a marker in front of an individuated animate object and omits it elsewhere.

Two further effects are weaker and are recorded as weaker. The possessive clitic prefers an animate possessor, so a phrase built on a person reads naturally where the same phrase built on an object is usually replaced by a prepositional one, but the preference is gradient, it admits many counterexamples, and no clause is ungrammatical for violating it. The third person singular pronouns divide human from non-human, but that division is the same question the gender record answers and is filed there rather than counted twice here. The obligatoriness is recorded as conditioned because the contrast is forced only where one of the paired words is used, and no other position in the clause registers it at all.