Animacy

Animacy is... (intro)

From the Nouns article

This information has been taken from the ==Animacy== section under the Nouns article and is no longer present there.

All nouns in Mi'gmaq belong to one of two categories, animate and inanimate. Animate nouns generally refer to things that are alive, such as people or animals, but other words such as containers and some types of food or clothing can also be animate. Inanimate nouns generally refer to things that are not alive, such as places and objects like rocks and tables. Some examples are below:

1. lpatuj  
   boy.AN  
   'boy (animate)'

1. mu'in    
   bear.AN  
   'bear (animate)'

1. tuop'ti      
   window.INAN  
   'window (inanimate)'

1. guntew     
   rock.INAN  
   'rock (inanimate)'

Animacy is important because it influences how to make the plural of a noun, and what form of verb to use with it. This also means that if you see a noun in a sentence and you want to try to figure out whether it it is animate or inanimate, there are a few things you can look for in addition to meaning: if its plural is -ug/-ig/-oq/-g, then it's animate, or if it's -l/long consonant then it's inanimate (see the section above for examples). If the noun is the subject of a sentence, then it's almost definitely animate, because only animate beings can do things. If the noun is the object of a sentence, the verb will have a different form depending on whether it's a VTA (animate) or VTI (inanimate).

1. nemi-g  epit      
   see-TA  woman.AN  
   'I see the woman'

1. nemi-tu  ptauti      
   see-TI   table.INAN  
   'I see the table'

Some words can change from being animate to inanimate. For example, the names of animals are animate, but when you eat their meat, the meat is inanimate. This is expressed by adding the ending -ewei to the name of the animal.

1. plamu   
   salmon  
   'salmon (live fish)'

1. plamu-ewei   
   salmon-EWEI  
   'salmon meat, salmon steak'

From the Verbs article

This information is copied from the original section ==Animacy & transitivity== in the Verbs article, although it has not been deleted from there because it overlaps with transitivity.

Animacy is a classification of the status of a noun as animate or inanimate. This classification is often related to whether the noun is alive (animate), such as humans and animals, or not alive (inanimate), such as a chair and a table. But sometimes there may not be an obvious connection between the meaning of the noun and whether it is animate or inanimate. For example, containers tend to be animate, and some foods and items of clothing are animate (such as gmu'jmin 'raspberry') while others are inanimate (such as aloqoman 'grape'). This is similar to gender in other languages, such as in French, un couteau 'a knife' is masculine and la cuillère 'the spoon' is feminine.

Transitivity refers to how many people, things, or groups need to be involved in the action of the verb. If the verb only has a subject, we call it intransitive, and if it has both a subject and an object, we call it transitive.

Both animacy and transitivity are important and result in a 4 way classification of verbs: intransitive verbs with an animate subject [VAI], intransitive verbs with an inanimate subject [VII}, transitive verbs with an animate subject and object [VTA], and transitive verbs with an animate subject and an inanimate object [VTI]. Verbs within each classification have different forms to encode information. Please refer to the specific pages for each classification for the details of each.

Algonquian verb classes

	Intransitive	Transitive
Animate	VAI	VTA
Inanimate	VII	VTI

Depending on which classification the verb has, person and number marking will differ.