Language gives us a special window on human diversity, with a surprising degree of variation found across the world’s 7000 or so different languages. As more and more languages are being described, analyzed, and better understood by linguists, the depth and breadth of differences among languages are becoming increasingly apparent, and the implications of this variation are better appreciated. Systematic comparison of structural properties of different languages has various aims:

Each year a topic is focused upon, as subject for research in the course. The topic for 2017-2018 is animacy in language. Animacy is a property of referents (referential expressions) reflecting their (experienced) degree of being alive or sentient. Animacy is generally conceptualized as a hierarchy ranking humans above animals, which in turn are ranked above inanimate things (human>animate>inanimate). It has a profound effect on the encoding of referents both in grammar and in language use in languages across the globe. We will investigate the effect of animacy in the domains of grammatical gender, agreement, word order and case marking. In addition, we will investigate which factors influence the (differential) conceptualization of referents as being animate or inanimate, as this classification may change from one language or linguistic situation to the next.