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. 224–247

Animals, animacy and anthropocentrism

| Lancaster University

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.

Keywords: animacy, anthropocentrism, animals, corpus assisted discourse analysis
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Animacy: Hierarchies and taxonomies
    • Linguistic markers of animacy
  • Humans and other animals as networks
  • A corpus of texts about animals
    • Approaches to analysis
    • Analysis 1: Subject animals in scientific journal articles
    • Analysis 2: Animals compared across the whole corpus
    • Analysis 3: Contrasting representations of dogs
  • Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 28 June 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijolc.00008.sea
References
Ackerman, J.
(2016) The Genius of Birds (Kindle ed.). London: Corsair.Google Scholar
Anthony, L.
(2014) AntConc (Version 3.4.3). Tokyo, Japan. Retrieved from http://​www​.antlab​.sci​.waseda​.ac​.jp/
Arluke, A., & Sanders, C. R.
(1996) The sociozoologic scale. In A. Arluke & C. R. Sanders (Eds.), Regarding Animals (pp. 167–186). Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Atran, S.
(1999) The universal primacy of generic species in folkbiological taxonomy: implications for human biological, cultural and scientific evolution. In R. A. Wilson (Ed.), Species: new interdisciplinary essays (pp. 231–261). Cambridge, Mass.: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Google Scholar
Bednarek, M.
(2006) Evaluation in Media Discourse: analysis of a newspaper corpus. London: A&C Black.Google Scholar
Bell, A.
(1991) The Language of News Media. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Bennett, J.
(2010) Vibrant Matter: a political ecology of things: Duke University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bhatia, V. K., Langton, N. M., & Lung, J.
(2004) Legal discourse: opportunities and threats for corpus linguistics. In U. Connor & T. A. Upton (Eds.), Discourse in the professions: Perspectives from corpus linguistics (Vol. 161, pp. 203–231). Amsterdam: John Benjamins DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Birke, L.
(2012) Animal bodies in the production of scientific knowledge: modelling medicine. Body & Society, 18(3–4), 156–178. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Burghardt, G. M.
(1991) Cognitive ethology and critical anthropomorphism: a snake with two heads and hognose snakes that play dead. In C. A. Ristau (Ed.), Cognitive ethology: the minds of other animals. Essays in honor of Donald R. Griffin (pp. 53–90). Hillsdale, NJ, US: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Cameron, D.
(1995) Verbal Hygiene. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Charles, N.
(2014) “Animals just love you as you are”: experiencing kinship across the species barrier. Sociology, 48(4), 715–730. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Clutton-Brock, J.
(1995) Aristotle, the scale of nature, and modern attitudes to animals. Social Research, 421–440.Google Scholar
Comrie, B.
(1989) Language Universals and Linguistic Typology: syntax and morphology: University of Chicago press.Google Scholar
Coole, D., & Frost, S.
(2010a) Introducing the new materialisms. In D. Coole & S. Frost (Eds.), New materialisms: Ontology, agency, and politics (pp. 1–43).Google Scholar
(Eds.) (2010b) New Materialisms: ontology, agency, and politics. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Croft, W.
(1991) Syntactic Categories and Grammatical Relations: the cognitive organization of information. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Dahl, O.
(2000) Animacy and the notion of semantic gender. In B. Unterbeck (Ed.), Gender in Grammar and Cognition (Vol. 1241, pp. 99–116).Google Scholar
(2008) Animacy and egophoricity: grammar, ontology and phylogeny. Lingua, 118(2), 141–150. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dahl, O., & Fraurud, K.
(1996) Animacy in grammar and discourse. In T. Fretheim & J. K. Gundel (Eds.), Reference and Referent Accessibility (pp. 47–64). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
De Swart, P., Lamers, M., & Lestrade, S.
(2008) Animacy, argument structure, and argument encoding. Lingua, 118(2), 131–140. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
DeLanda, M.
(2016) Assemblage Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F.
(1988) A Thousand Plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. London: BloomsburyGoogle Scholar
DeMello, M.
(2012) Animals and Society: an introduction to human-animal studies. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Despret, V.
(2016) What Would Animals Say if we Asked the Right Questions? (B. Buchanan, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dupré, J.
(1999) Are whales fish? In D. L. Medin & S. Atran (Eds.), Folkbiology (pp. 461–476). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.Google Scholar
(2012) Processes of Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Dupré, J., & O’Malley, M. A.
(2007) Metagenomics and biological ontology. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 381, 834–846. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Enger, H. -O., & Nesset, T.
(2011) Constraints on diachronic development: the Animacy Hierarchy and the Relevance Constraint. STUF-Language Typology and Universals Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung, 64(3), 193–212. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Folli, R., & Harley, H.
(2008) Teleology and animacy in external arguments. Lingua: Animacy, Argument Structure, and Argument Encoding, 118(2), 190–192 102. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Garner, R.
(2002) Political ideology and the legal status of animals. Animal Law, 81, 77–91.Google Scholar
Gilquin, G., & Jacobs, G. M.
(2006) Elephants who marry mice are very unusual: the use of the relative pronoun who with nonhuman animals. Society & Animals, 14(1), 79–105. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Godfrey-Smith, P.
(2013) Cephalopods and the evolution of the mind. Pacific Conservation Biology, 19(1), 4–9. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Goldbort, R.
(2006) Writing for Science: Yale university press.Google Scholar
Gupta, A. F.
(2006) Foxes, hounds, and horses: who or which? Society & Animals, 14(1), 107–128. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Halliday, M. A. K.
([1990] 2001) New ways of meaning: the challenge to applied linguistics. In A. Fill & P. Mühlhäusler (Eds.), The Ecolinguistics Reader (pp. 175–202). London & New York: Continuum.Google Scholar
Halliday, M. A. K., & Matthiessen, C. M. I. M.
(2004) An Introduction to Functional Grammar (3rd ed.). London: Arnold.Google Scholar
Hallsworth, S.
(2011) Then they came for the dogs! Crime, law and social change, 55(5), 391–403. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Herzog, H.
(2010) Some We Love, Some We hate, Some We Eat: why it’s so hard to think straight about animals. New York: Harper Perennial.Google Scholar
Hird, M. J.
(2009) The Origins of Sociable Life: evolution after science studies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hopper, P. J., & Thompson, S. A.
(1994) Language universals, discourse pragmatics, and semantics. Language Sciences, 15(4), 357–376. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jensen, F. H., & Tyack, P. L.
(2013) Studying acoustic communication in pilot whale social groups. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 134(5). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kilgarriff, A.
Lexical Computing. Sketch Engine: http://​www​.sketchengine​.co​.uk. Retrieved from http://​www​.sketchengine​.co​.uk
Langacker, R. W.
(1991) Foundations of Cognitive Grammar (Vol. II1 Descriptive Application). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Leheckovd, H.
(2000) Use and misuse of gender in Czech. In B. Unterbeck (Ed.), Gender in Grammar and Cognition (Vol. 1241, pp. 749–770).Google Scholar
Levinson, S. C.
(2003) Space in Language and Cognition: Explorations in cognitive diversity (Vol. 51). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Malchukov, A. L.
(2008) Animacy and asymmetries in differential case marking. Lingua, 118(2), 203–221. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Marino, L., & Colvin, C. M.
(2015) Thinking pigs: a comparative review of cognition, emotion, and personality in sus domesticus. International Journal of Comparative Psychology, 28.Google Scholar
Mosel, U. & Spriggs, R.
(2000) Gender in Teop. In B. Unterbeck (Ed.), Gender in Grammar and Cognition: I: Approaches to Gender. II: Manifestations of Gender (pp. 321–350). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Nussbaum, M.
(2007) The moral status of animals. In L. Kalof & A. Fitzgerald (Eds.), The Animals Reader (pp. 30–36). Oxford & New York: Berg.Google Scholar
Pavlinov, I. Y.
(2013) The species problem, why again. The Species Problem-Ongoing Issues, 3–37.Google Scholar
Rabinowitz, H., & Vogel, S.
(Eds.) (2009) The Manual of Scientific Style: a guide for authors, editors, and researchers: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Santamaria, S. L., Fallon, M., Green, J. M., Schulz, S., & Wilcke, J. R.
(2012) Developing the animals in context ontology. Paper presented at the ICBO.
Sealey, A., & Oakley, L.
(2013) Anthropomorphic grammar? Some linguistic patterns in the wildlife documentary series Life . Text & Talk, 33(3), 399–420. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sealey, A., & Pak, C.
(forthcoming in 2018) First catch your corpus: methodological challenges in constructing a thematic corpus. Corpora, 13(2). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Stibbe, A.
(2006) Deep ecology and language: the curtailed journey of the Atlantic salmon. Society & Animals, 14(1), 61–77. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Talmy, L.
(2000) Toward a Cognitive Semantics (Vol. 21). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT press.Google Scholar
Thomas, K.
(1983) Man and the Natural World: changing attitudes in England 1500–1800: Penguin UK.Google Scholar
Tudge, C.
(2000) The Variety of Life: a survey and a celebration of all the creatures that have ever lived. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Yamamoto, M.
(1999) Animacy and Reference: a cognitive approach to corpus linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Zaenen, A., Carletta, J., Garretson, G., Bresnan, J., Koontz-Garboden, A., Nikitina, T., & Wasow, T.
(2004) Animacy encoding in English: why and how. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the 2004 ACL workshop on discourse annotation. DOI logo
Cited by

Cited by 5 other publications

Bouchard, Jérémie
2021.  In Complexity, Emergence, and Causality in Applied Linguistics, ► pp. 27 ff. Crossref logo
Bouchard, Jérémie
2021.  In Complexity, Emergence, and Causality in Applied Linguistics, ► pp. 253 ff. Crossref logo
Carter, Elizabeth J., Samantha Reig, Xiang Zhi Tan, Gierad Laput, Stephanie Rosenthal & Aaron Steinfeld
2020.  In Proceedings of the 2020 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, ► pp. 589 ff. Crossref logo
Micalay-Hurtado, Marco A. & Robert Poole
2022. Eco-critical language awareness for English language teaching (ELT): Promoting justice, wellbeing, and sustainability in the classroom. Journal of World Languages 8:2 ► pp. 371 ff. Crossref logo
Sealey, Alison
2021. Response to Viewpoint article ‘‘Applied linguistics, language guidelines and ethical practices: The case for the use of ‘who’ with nonhuman animals’’. International Journal of Applied Linguistics 31:2 ► pp. 304 ff. Crossref logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 14 january 2023. 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.