@inproceedings{gregorio-etal-2025-cross,
    title = "The Cross-linguistic Role of {A}nimacy in Grammar Structures",
    author = "Gregorio, Nina  and
      Gay, Matteo  and
      Goldwater, Sharon  and
      Ponti, Edoardo",
    editor = "Che, Wanxiang  and
      Nabende, Joyce  and
      Shutova, Ekaterina  and
      Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Vienna, Austria",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.364/",
    pages = "7349--7363",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-251-0",
    abstract = "Animacy is a semantic feature of nominals and follows a hierarchy: personal pronouns {\ensuremath{>}} human {\ensuremath{>}} animate {\ensuremath{>}} inanimate. In several languages, animacy imposes hard constraints on grammar. While it has been argued that these constraints may emerge from universal soft tendencies, it has been difficult to provide empirical evidence for this conjecture due to the lack of data annotated with animacy classes. In this work, we first propose a method to reliably classify animacy classes of nominals in 11 languages from 5 families, leveraging multilingual large language models (LLMs) and word sense disambiguation datasets. Then, through this newly acquired data, we verify that animacy displays consistent cross-linguistic tendencies in terms of preferred morphosyntactic constructions, although not always in line with received wisdom: animacy in nouns correlates with the alignment role of agent, early positions in a clause, and syntactic pivot (e.g., for relativisation), but not necessarily with grammatical subjecthood. Furthermore, the behaviour of personal pronouns in the hierarchy is idiosyncratic as they are rarely plural and relativised, contrary to high-animacy nouns."
}