In the Nejapa region of Oaxaca, places now categorized by some as archaeological ruins have retained power and meaning through time. Ruins often retain vibrancy and are (and were) typically treated respectfully and carefully. Although many of the sites may no longer be occupied by humans, these ruined or palimpsest places should not be considered entirely abandoned or uninhabited. Some sites in Nejapa, such as Los Picachos and Cerro del Convento, were charged with spiritual valency that inspired people to leave offerings at the sites. Other long unoccupied archaeological sites, such as the ruins of La Baeza, Casa Vieja, and the Pueblo Viejo, were viewed in multiple ways: sometimes approached with trepidation or purposely avoided, and at other times viewed with nostalgia and reverence. Part of what makes ruins powerful and layered with meanings is their association with ancestors and their common connections to memorable, and often difficult, historical events. Thus, ruins play active roles and can at times inspire social actions and at other times entail intentional avoidance.

Rather than static traces of the past, ruins and ancient material objects represent dynamic and important generative components of communities. A relational ontology views objects and matter as animate; here we focus on their collaborative potential with humans to inspire memory practices that bring together ancestors and living humans, things, and landscapes in recursive relationships. Situated at Etlatongo in the Mixteca Alta of Oaxaca, Mexico, our research interrogates broader Mixtec and Mesoamerican perspectives on things, which indicates certain materials and ruined places could be especially potent, imbued with cosmogonic energy from previous eras. Such material had animating properties as well as inspiring memorial narratives. Continuously occupied for more than 3,500 years, Etlatongo illustrates dynamic and varied interactions with past places and things. We present two precontact archaeological case studies that highlight these persistent engagements with the past: the first focuses on the reuse and reincorporation of earlier public architecture while the second features the selection and generative power of ancient ceramic figurine heads in two later domestic settings.

A central debate in the literature on grammatical number systems and nominal semantics is whether the countable/noncountable contrast is ontologically based or ultimately arbitrary. This article examines this question in light of several languages that express three or more categories of grammatical number, in particular including a collective category containing nouns of an intermediate status between prototypical countable nouns and prototypical noncountable nouns. I connect this crosslinguistic data to psycholinguistic research on individuation, identifying several individuation types, that is, noun meanings organized into equivalence classes based on shared individuation properties. The individuation types themselves can be ordered, giving rise to a scale of individuation. I propose that the organization of grammatical number systems reflects the scale of individuation, effectively steering a middle course between ontological and grammatical accounts. This approach accounts for a range of grammatical number systems and makes broad predictions bearing on what possible grammatical number systems are.

This article provides a general analysis of the semantics of person, broadly construed, through a case study of Ojibwe (Central Algonquian). Ojibwe shows person-like distinctions based on whether an entity is living or nonliving (i.e. animacy) and, within living things, whether a being is prominent or backgrounded in the discourse (i.e. obviation). The central principle of the account is contrast: the activation and interpretation of a feature is driven by the requirement that it makes a cut to derive the proper categories within a given inventory. With this principle, I show that a small set of bivalent features denoting first-order predicates can capture Ojibwe as well as a wider typology of person, animacy, obviation, and noun classification distinctions.

This article argues for a three-way structural characterization of Fijian objects: common nouns can be incorporated or dislocated, but pronouns and proper nouns occur inside the VP as complements. These facts support an analysis of Fijian as a polysynthetic language, since it is a pronominal argument language with incorporated objects. Having complement nominals inside the VP, however, puts Fijian outside the scope of Baker's (1996) polysynthesis parameter. The distribution of complements in Fijian follows from Hopper and Thompson's (1980) transitivity hypothesis, since only those nominals with the highest degree of individuation can occur inside the VP.

We are used to thinking about person, number, and gender as features to which the grammar is sensitive. But the place of animacy is less familiar, despite its robust syntactic activity in many languages. I investigate the pronominal system of Southeastern Sierra Zapotec, identifying an interpretive parallel between animacy and person. Third-person plural pronouns, which encode a four-way animacy distinction in the language, exhibit associativity, a cluster of interpretive properties that have been argued also to characterize first- and second-person plural pronouns. Building on Kratzer's (2009) and Harbour's (2016) theories of person, I propose a plurality-based semantics for animacy that captures their shared properties. The compositional mechanism underlying this semantics ties person and animacy features to a single syntactic position inside the noun phrase. This enables an understanding of these features' shared relevance to syntactic operations, including those underlying pronoun cliticization. In these Zapotec varieties, it is constrained both by person (in the well-known person-case constraint) and by animacy.

This article discusses the variation between masculine and neuter anaphoric pronouns in Afrikaans, especially in reference to inanimate entities such as objects, abstracts, collectives, and masses. The fact that books, governments, and wine can be referred to as both hy ‘he’ and dit ‘it’ is well known, but it is surprising given what is known about pronominal gender systems. Such systems are usually organized according to clear semantic principles, yielding predictable choices. The article summarizes the available literature, provides new data from the NWU-Kommentaarkorpus, and presents an approach that helps to make sense of the synchronic variation and, to some extent, the diachronic developments.

Is it possible to acquire a sensitivity to a regularity in language without intending to and without awareness of what it is? In this conceptual replication and extension of an earlier study (Williams, 2005) participants were trained on a semiartificial language in which determiner choice was dependent on noun animacy. Participants who did not report awareness or recognition of this rule were nevertheless above chance at selecting the correct determiner in novel contexts. However, further analyses based on trial-by-trial subjective judgments and item similarity statistics were consistent with the possibility that responses were based on conscious feelings of familiarity or analogy to trained items rather than unconscious knowledge of a semantic generalization. The results are discussed in terms of instance-based approaches to memory and language, and the implications for the concept of “learning without awareness” are considered.

Here we investigate present tense verbal -s/zero variability in a dialect of Eastern England in which -s marking can only appear in third-person singular contexts. Our objective is to explore constraints on -s/zero marking, and to consider the grammatical function of -s in such a variety. In order to investigate this, we reanalyzed verbal -s/zero marking in 63 sociolinguistic interviews found in Peter Trudgill’s (1974) corpus from Norwich. The results show not only a significant role for subject animacy (animate subjects mark -s less than inanimates) and lexical (punctual verbs mark -s less than duratives) and structural aspect (punctual and habitual events mark less -s than durative ones), but also an interaction between animacy and aspect. To account for the findings, we draw upon the notion of differential subject marking (e.g., Aissen, 2003), which considers the role of the canonicity of arguments in accounting for morphological marking.

Prosody includes the pitch, timing and loudness in speech, which can convey meaning and emotion. This study examines whether prosodic categories affect novel noun learning and whether the referent characteristic influence learning. Previous research showed that emotional prosody interfered with adults’ noun learning (West et al., 2017), but it had no effect on children (West et al., 2022). However, these researchers varied their method across ages, including animacy and complexity of the referent, and it is unclear if the results extend beyond the three emotional prosodies tested. Participants in the current set of studies heard novel words presented in five prosodic categories (within-subject) in order to learn the label for either animate or inanimate objects (between-subject). Study 1 compared inanimate objects and aliens, with better noun learning performance for inanimate objects. Study 2 compared inanimate objects with the same objects with faces added, but there was no difference in noun learning by object type. Both studies showed differences in noun learning by the prosodic category, with warning less accurate than naming. These results demonstrate how extralinguistic factors like prosody, attention and referent complexity influence noun learning.

The Estonian indefinite pronouns keegi ‘someone’ and miski ‘something’ are distinguished by being able to refer to animate or inanimate entities, respectively. However, in certain Estonian dialects, keegi is used to refer to inanimate entities as well. The aim of this paper is to describe the functions and use of keegi based on the data in the Corpus of Estonian Dialects. We used statistical analyses to determine which dialects typically use keegi to refer to inanimate entities and which variables (polarity, function, position in the clause, case marking) contribute most to this variation. The results show that there are significant differences between the dialects: keegi is mostly used to refer to inanimate entities in the northern dialects (most frequently in the Western, Mid, and Eastern dialects), but this phenomenon is rare or non-existent in the southern dialects. All of the variables studied contribute to this variation: keegi is most likely to refer to an inanimate being when it is in the partitive case, functions as an object, a partitive subject, or a negative polarity item, and is positioned at the end of a negative clause.