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Animacies

Duke University Press

Contents

Acknowledgments..............................................viiIntroduction: Animating Animacy..............................11. Language and Mattering Humans.............................232. Queer Animation...........................................573. Queer Animality...........................................894. Animals, Sex, and Transsubstantiation.....................1275. Lead's Racial Matters.....................................1596. Following Mercurial Affect................................189Afterword: The Spill and the Sea.............................223Notes........................................................239Bibliography.................................................261Index........................................................283

Chapter One

This chapter aims to recover the alchemical magic of language, whether benevolent or vicious, by demonstrating explicit ways that it animates humans, animals, and things in between. I suggest that this can be done in collusion with existing registers of citizenship, race, sex, ability, and sexuality, depending on the recurrent materializations of iterative power; and it might possibly be done without abandoning the nonhuman animal to the realm of the nonlinguistic (as dominant hierarchies foretell). Language's fundamental means, I suggest, is something called animacy, a concept most deeply explored in cognitive linguistics.

In what follows, I sketch a brief history of the study of animacy within linguistics, as I range beyond the borders of that discipline to think through how de-animation (by way of objectification) also proceeds through and within speech. I go directly to linguistics and ask after its own devices, beginning with the moment in anthropological linguistics where animacy hierarchies first appeared. Then I provisionally deploy a specific framework from the subfield of cognitive linguistics, insisting on the generally untold stories of conceptual mattering and materiality that lie there. I then turn to questions of objectification that have long circulated in critical race, feminist, and disability theory; for while, as I will demonstrate, objectification is a preeminent kind of mattering, its linguistic instance is far from a self-evident process. I pay special attention to how the "animal" is re lentlessly recruited as the presumed field of rejection of and for the "human."

Introducing Animacy

For linguists, animacy is the quality of liveness, sentience, or humanness of a noun or noun phrase that has grammatical, often syntactic, consequences. Bernard Comrie calls animacy an "extralinguistic conceptual property" that manifests in "a range of formally quite different ways ... in the structure of different languages." Despite animacy's apparently extralinguistic character, however, it pushes forward again and again: Comrie explains that "the reason why animacy is of linguistic relevance is because essentially the same kinds of conceptual distinction are found to be of structural relevance across a wide range of languages."

Mutsumi Yamamoto notes that, by necessity, no treatment of animacy can be limited to the linguistic, for animacy lies within and without. While animacy does not behave in a regular fashion in relation to language structures, it retains a consistent cross-linguistic significance that no other concept seems to address: "the same kind of conceptual distinction seems to be working as a dominant force in various different structural and pragmatic factors across a wide variety of languages in the world." Furthermore, Comrie notes that even if animacy is not apparently structurally encoded in a language, it can influence the direction of language change, as in the case of Slavonic languages. Even if language is in some sense tuned to animacy, animacy is clearly not obligated to it. Does animacy slip out of language's bounds, or does language slip out of animacy's bounds? In this book, the slippage of animacy in relation to its successive co-conspirators will be a repeating, and in my view most productive, refrain.

Many scholars credit animacy's first serious appearance in linguistics to Michael Silverstein's idea of an "animacy hierarchy," which appears in a comparative study of indigenous North American Chinookan, Australian Dyirbal, and other indigenous Australian languages published in 1976. While most understandings of animacy today depart from Silverstein's binary-features account and his focus on finding an explanation for ergative languages, largely in first, second, and third personhood, his initial insights and formulations maintain relevance today in their close pairing of extralinguistic factors with linguistic structure.

Ergative languages (such as Basque) are distinguished from accusative languages (such as Japanese and English) by how their behavior is mapped in relation to transitive verbs (verbs that have a subject and direct object) and intransitive verbs (verbs with only one argument, a subject). How the subjects or objects of these two types of verbs receive "case marking," that is, a grammatical indicator of their semantic role in relation to the action of the verb, determines the overall language classification. In accusative systems, the object of a transitive verb (the lion ate me) can receive distinct marking, whereas the subject of a transitive verb (I ate the lion) and the subject of an intransitive verb (I panicked) are the same. In ergative systems, the subject of a transitive verb receives ergative case marking, unlike the object of the transitive verb or the subject of an intransitive verb. Such behavior, however, is not entirely fixed. Many ergative languages exhibit "split" behavior in which both ergative and accusative case markings are possible for certain subject or object arguments; that is, certain expressions can be rendered either way.

Silverstein explained this split by proposing a hierarchy of animacy. He claimed that many similar Australian languages appeared to show "splits of ergativity patterned with respect to a lexical hierarchy," locating the determining line of distinction between ergative and accusative markings in the characteristic semantics of nouns:

In this paper, I want to bring out the fact that "split" of case-marking is not random. At its most dramatic, it defines a hierarchy of what might be called "inherent lexical content" of noun phrases, first and second person as well as third person. This hierarchy expresses the semantic naturalness for a lexically-specified noun phrase to function as agent of a true transitive verb, and inversely the naturalness of functioning as patient of such. The noun phrases at the top of the hierarchy manifest nominative-accusative case-marking, while those at the bottom manifest ergative-absolutive case marking. Sometimes there is a middle ground which is a three-way system of O-A-S case markings. We can define the hierarchy independent of the facts of split ergativity by our usual notions of surface-category markedness.

Silverstein observed that less animate subjects were more likely to receive special ergative marking, in a kind of communicative reassurance that such types of subjects could indeed possess the agentive or controlling capacities required to do the action provided by the verb. More animate subjects did not...