Animacy is a presupposition in Swahili
Domain:
natural language processingRecord type:
paper
In this paper, I argue that the phenomenon of animacy override in Swahili arises
from the interaction between a syntactic structure with multiple nominal heads
and general principles of distributed morphology. This syntactic analysis narrows
the possibilities for a semantic analysis of animacy, strongly suggesting an ap-
proach previously proposed for gender in Romance languages. Specifically, I argue
that Swahili has an interpretable +animate feature which denotes a partial func-
tion which is defined only on animate predicates of type et and which denotes the
identity function where it is defined.
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