animacy
noun [ U ] language specialized uk/ˈæn.ɪ.mə.si/ us/ˈæn.ə.mə.si/
有生性
the quality in a noun of referring to something animate (= a living being)
Studies suggest that animacy has some influence on the syntactic structure of sentences. 研究表明（名词的）有生性对句子的句法结构有一些影响。
Animacy and agency are linked in English; for example, sentences such as "The man kicked the ball" are more frequent than sentences such as "The ladder hit the man." 在英语里，有生性和能动性是相关联的;以句子为例，比如“人踢了球”就比“梯子砸了人”更常见。
- More examples
- With older children animacy might elicit the production of passive clauses.
- Animacy is one of the most elementary principles in many languages, and is a distinction understood at a very early age.
- Slavic languages that have case, including Russian, have a complex hierarchy of animacy.
- The study looked at the influence of animacy on relative clause processing.