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2.2 Review on Animacy Effect

2.2.1 Introduction to Animacy Effect

“Animacy” is one of the categorical concepts in human cognition of the world, which is also reflected in language from vocabulary to syntax. From an evolutionary perspective, humans need to recognize animate objects more quickly and accurately. Thus, the humans’ nervous system has evolved some neural pathways for animate and inanimate objects. These mechanisms are beneficial to seek advantages and avoid harm in a living environment, which is of great significance to humans’ survival. Psycholinguists (Comrie, 1989) divided the animacy of life in the world roughly: human > animal > inanimate. Researchers believe that the animacy of life is a continuum from higher to lower and is expressed in all languages with different forms. Nouns with higher animacy degrees tend to have higher application force, while lower-degree nouns are on the contrary (Wang, 2004). Therefore, nouns with different animacy degrees often have different functions in language processing.

It was found that animacy has a certain influence on the use of syntactic cues, for example, possessive case. In English, there are two basic forms of possessive cases. One is “s-genitive” (e.g., Mary's bag) and the other is “of-genitive” (e.g., the window of the house). Rosenbach (2007a, 2007b) suggested that animacy affects the use of the possessive case. The “s-genitive” format tends to be chosen for animate things, while the “of-genitive” tends to be chosen for inanimate things. Likewise, the changes in inflectional forms and categories are also influenced by animacy. Renkema (2002) found that when some quantifiers in Dutch modify people, they must add the suffix “-n”. When these quantifiers modify inanimate nouns, they do not need suffixes. In Latin, feminine and masculine nouns are mostly animate nouns but neuter nouns are mostly inanimate nouns. 

Chapter Three Theoretical Foundations .......................... 20

3.1 Bock & Levelt’s Model ................................. 20

3.2 Residual Activation Account ............................ 22

3.3 The Thematic Hierarchy Theory ......................... 23

Chapter Four Methodology ................................ 26

4.1 Research Questions ............................ 26

4.2 Participants .................................... 27

4.3 Target Structures ..................................... 28 

Chapter Five Results and Discussion ............................. 40

5.1 The Facilitation Effect of Syntactic Priming on ORC ..................... 40

5.1.1 Results of the Facilitation Effect of Syntactic Priming on ORC ................................... 40

5.1.2 Discussion of the Facilitation Effect of Syntactic Priming on ORC ................................ 44

Chapter Five Results and Discussion

5.1 The Facilitation Effect of Syntactic Priming on ORC

5.1.1 Results of the Facilitation Effect of Syntactic Priming on ORC 

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