Cover not available
Article published In:
From Culture to Language and Back: The Animacy Hierarchy in language and discourse
Edited by Laure Gardelle and Sandrine Sorlin
[International Journal of Language and Culture 5:2] 2018
► pp. 203–223

Bringing the toys to life

Animacy, reference, and anthropomorphism in Toy Story

 | University of Leeds
 | University of Tartu
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.
Keywords: animacy, anthropomorphism, referential expressions, children’s fiction, film narrative
Article outline
  • Introduction
    • Animacy in fiction
  • Background
    • Animacy and reference
    • Non-linguistic cues to animacy
  • Animacy and referring expressions in Toy Story
    • Method
    • Anthropomorphic toys
    • Animal toys
    • Inanimates
    • Supernatural beings
  • Animacy and the unfolding narrative
    • The mutants
    • Buzz is a Toy
  • Discussion and conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 28 June 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijolc.00007.nel
References (33)
References
Ariel, M. (1990) Accessing NP antecedents. London: Routledge, Croom Helm.Google Scholar
(1991). The function of accessibility in a theory of grammar. Journal of Pragmatics, 16(5), 443-463. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Atran, S., Medin, D., Lynch, E., Vapnarsky, V., Ek’ Ucan, E. & Sousa, P. (2001). Folkbiology doesn’t come from folkpsychology: Evidence from Yukatek Maya in cross-cultural perspective. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 1(1), 3–42. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Biro, S., Csibra, G., & Gergely, G. (2007). The role of behavioral cues in understanding goal-directed actions in infancy. Progress in brain research, 1641, 303–322. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Carey, S. (1985). Conceptual change in childhood. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Chen, M. (2012). Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cherry, J. (1992). Animism in Thought and Language. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of California at Berkeley.Google Scholar
Comrie, B. (1989). Language Universals and Linguistic Typology (2nd ed). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Dahl, Ö. (2008). Animacy and egophoricity: Grammar, ontology and phylogeny. Lingua, 1181, 141–150. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dahl, Ö. & Fraurud, K. (1996). Animacy in grammar and discourse. In T. Fretheim & J. K. Gundel (Eds.), Reference and referent accessibility (pp. 47–64). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
DeLancey, S. (1981). An interpretation of split ergativity and related patterns. Language, 571, 626–657. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Foley, W. A. & Van Valin, R. D., Jr. (1984). Functional syntax and universal grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Gelman, S. A. & Opfer, J. E. (2002). Development of the animate-inanimate distinction. In U. Goswami (Ed.), Blackwell Handbook of Childhood Cognitive Development (pp. 151–166). Oxford: Blackwell. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gundel, J. K., Hedberg, N. & Zacharski, R. (1993). Cognitive status and the form of referring expressions in discourse. Language, 69(2), 274–307. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hurford, J. R. (2007). The Origins of Meaning. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Johnson, M. H. & Morton, J. (1991). Biology and Cognitive Development: The Case of Face Recognition. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Klaiman, M. H. (1991). Grammatical Voice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Leopold, D. & Rhodes, G. (2010). A Comparative View of Face Perception. Journal of Comparative Psycholology, 124(3), 233–251. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lockwood, H. T. & McCaulay, M. (2012). Prominence hierarchies. Language and Linguistics Compass, 6/71, 431–446. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lyons, J. (1977). Semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Matthews, D. (Ed.). (2014). Pragmatic Development in First Language Acquisition (Trends in Language Acquisition Research, vol. 10). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Milne, C. (1974/2016). The Enchanted Places: A Childhood Memoir. London: Pan Macmillan.Google Scholar
Piper, W. (1930). The Little Engine that Could. New York: Platt & Munk.Google Scholar
Rakison, D. H. & Poulin-Dubois, D. (2001). Developmental origin of the animate-inanimate distinction. Psychological Bulletin, 1271, 209–228. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Searle, J. R. (1969). Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Siewierska, A. (1991). Functional Grammar. London and New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
(1993). Subject and object order in written Polish: Some statistical data. Folia Linguistica, 27(1/2), 147–169.Google Scholar
Trompenaars, T., Hogeweg, L., Stoop, W. & de Hoop, H. (in review). The language of an inanimate narrator. (submitted to Open Linguistics, special issue, ‘Effects of animacy in grammar and cognition’, D. Nelson & V. -A. Vihman, (Eds.), to appear 2018). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tsutsumi, S., Ushitani, T., Tomonaga, M. & Fujita, K. (2012). Infant monkeys’ concept of animacy: the role of eyes and fluffiness. Primates, 531, 113–119. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Whedon, J., Stanton, A., Cohen, J. and Sokolow, A. (1995). Toy Story. Original screenplay (unpublished).Google Scholar
Williams, M. (1922). The Velveteen Rabbit (or How Toys Become Real) New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc.Google Scholar
Yamamoto, M. (1999). Animacy and Reference: A cognitive approach to corpus linguistics. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by (3)

Cited by three other publications

Trompenaars, Thijs, Teresa Angelina Kaluge, Rezvan Sarabi & Peter de Swart
2021. Cognitive animacy and its relation to linguistic animacy: evidence from Japanese and Persian. Language Sciences 86 ► pp. 101399 ff. DOI logo
Macdonald, Ross, Silke Brandt, Anna Theakston, Elena Lieven & Ludovica Serratrice
2020. The Role of Animacy in Children's Interpretation of Relative Clauses in English: Evidence From Sentence–Picture Matching and Eye Movements. Cognitive Science 44:8 DOI logo
Deaville, James
2019. The moaning of (un-)life: Animacy, muteness and eugenics in cinematic and televisual representation. Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies 4:2 ► pp. 225 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 6 january 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.