| Besides person and number there are other features on the argument that the linguist may observe to agree between the subject and some other part of the sentence. The selection of the verb in the predicate depends on the presence of certain features. Intentional violation of agreement in some features gives rise to certain figures of speech. |
The figure of animism.Nouns whose meaning grammaticalizes as [+Animate] typically refer to an animate object, those as [–Animate] to an object that is inanimate. In (1) the subject is [+Animate] and so the author has used a form of the verb injure, whereas in (2) the subject is [–Animate], and so s/he has used a form of the verb damage. |
| (1) | The boy was injured in falling. | |
| (2) | The box was damaged in falling. |
| If the author had used an inanimate subject with a predicate that normally requires an animate subject, s/he would have forced an animate interpretation on the normally inanimate subject: |
| (3) | My puppet was injured in falling. |
| This is the figure of speech called animism. Sometimes animism is idiomatic. |
| (4) | Only her pride was injured in the fall. |
A rule of interpretation for animism.As is possible with many figures of speech the linguist might enlist the power of a transformation to describe its interpretation. As is evident from the above figure, there is a sentence feature of [+Animism] available to which a felicity condition and a semantic functor on the utterance of may be associated. The linguist says that the lexical verb injure projects the feature [+Animate] onto the subject argument. |
| Presumably a similar device might project the feature [–Animate] from damage, so that the “dog” in (1) would finally be interpreted as referring to an inanimate toy. |
| (1) | My dog was damaged in falling. |
The figure of personification.There are also constructions in which it is important whether the subject argument refers to a person or not. |
| (1) | Who fell? | [+Human]NOM  | |
| (2) | What fell? | [–Human]NOM |
| If the communicator were to use a non-human noun in a context where the communicant would normally expect reference to a human being, one would be using the figure of speech called personification. A chronic case of this figure may be called anthropomorphism. It is conceivable that in cases the inanimate object may be taken as akin to an animal. This could be easily canonized as another figure. |
A felicity condition to interpret personification.As with animism, there is a felicity condition imposed on the utterance: , which in this case is associated with the sentence feature of [+Personification]. The transformation takes the sign of the feature [–Human] on the subject argument as giving a human interpretation to the waves in: |
| (1) | The waves were kissing the rocks along the shore. |
