The Impact Of Animacy On Syntactic Structure

Animacy is not an original research subject. It was firstly put forward as a biological term, denoting how sentient or alive the referent of the noun is. After Hartman brought the term to the Dictionary of Language and Linguistics, linguists began to show interest in it. Comrie’s research proposed the animacy hierarchy, which provided powerful and systematic theoretical support for further study in this field. Animacy hierarchy is not a primary reflection of the natural biological phenomena. Instead, it reveals the reciprocation of several parameters relating to animacy. The four parameters, definiteness, familiarity, typicality, accessibility make combined action on animacy. Subsequent researches have been focusing on analyzing the detailed influence or effect of animacy on language. But the research in China remains rare and unsystematic. This thesis innovates the viewpoint and research perspective as to analyze and probe the great effect and impact of animacy on syntactic structure, setting several Chinese sentence structures that conclude two or more arguments as research target. It helps to expand the animacy concept from the biology thoroughly.The thesis aims to explore the impact of animacy on syntactic structure from two aspects. One is to analyze the impact of arguments’ animacy their place in the unmarked sentence. Four Chinese sentence patterns, SVO structure, S1S2VStructure, SVO1O2Structure, VOC or VCO Structure are exemplified to prove animacy has great influence on the arguments’ place in sentence. Two tendentious rules are summarized: one is that the argument of high animacy tends to preposed before that of low animacy; the other is that the argument of high animacy tends to be closer to the VP. And the other aspect is to analyze the demands of animacy that the arguments should meet in order to passivize a sentence. Two sentence structures are used to verify, of which the analysis of SVO structure is easy to be conducted and accepted. But the DOC sentence, as always a disputable structure, is much more complex. The author divides the passivization of DOC into two situations, one is to move the direct object to the front, the other is to put the indirect object to the front. Both of the two analyses show that the condition for a sentence to be passivized is that the object must bear relatively high animacy, or it can not proceed.Animacy is undoubtedly a new perspective of language study, and further studies are still needed to deal with other aspects of its influence.