Effects of animacy on the processing of morphological Number: a cognitive inheritance?
| Autor: | Chiara Zanini, Dunia Giomo, Francesca Peressotti, Rosa Rugani, Francesca Franzon |
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| Přispěvatelé: | University of Zurich |
| Rok vydání: | 2020 |
| Předmět: |
Linguistics and Language
470 Latin & Italic languages Numerical cognition 410 Linguistics Morphology (biology) 050105 experimental psychology Language and Linguistics 03 medical and health sciences Inheritance (object-oriented programming) 0302 clinical medicine 0501 psychology and cognitive sciences 1203 Language and Linguistics Morphological number 05 social sciences Gender Numerosity adaptation effect Cognition Animacy 800 Literature rhetoric & criticism 3310 Linguistics and Language 460 Spanish & Portuguese languages 450 Italian Romanian & related languages Psychology 030217 neurology & neurosurgery 440 French & related languages 10103 Institute of Romance Studies Cognitive psychology |
| Zdroj: | Word Structure. 13:22-44 |
| ISSN: | 1755-2036 1750-1245 |
| DOI: | 10.3366/word.2020.0158 |
| Popis: | Language encodes into morphology part of the information present in the referential world. Some features are marked in the great majority of languages, such as the numerosity of the referents that is encoded in morphological Number. Other features do not surface as frequently in morphological markings, yet they are pervasive in natural languages. This is the case of animacy, that can ground Gender systems as well as constrain the surfacing of Number. The diffusion of numerosity and animacy could mirror their biological salience at the extra-linguistic cognitive level. Human extra-linguistic numerical abilities are phylogenetically ancient and are observed in non-human animal species, especially when counting salient animate entities such as social companions. Does the saliency of animacy influence the morphological encoding of Number in language processing?We designed an experiment to test the encoding of morphological Number in language processing in relation to animacy. In Italian, Gender and Number are mandatorily expressed in a fusional morpheme. In some nouns denoting animate referents, Gender encodes the sex of referents and is semantically interpretable. In some other animate nouns and in inanimate nouns, Gender is uninterpretable at the semantic level. We found that it is easier to inflect for Number nouns when the inflectional morpheme is interpretable with respect to a semantic feature related to animacy. We discuss the possibility that the primacy of animacy in counting is mirrored in morphological processing and that morphology is designed to easily express information that is salient from a cognitive point of view. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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