Rights statement: This article has been accepted for publication in International Journal of Language and Culture, Volume 5, Issue 2, 2018, pages: 224–247, © 2018 John Benjamins, the publisher should be contacted for permission to re-use the material in any form.
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Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - Animals, animacy and anthropocentrism
AU - Sealey, Alison Jean
N1 - This article has been accepted for publication in International Journal of Language and Culture, Volume 5, Issue 2, 2018, pages: 224–247, © 2018 John Benjamins, the publisher should be contacted for permission to re-use the material in any form.
PY - 2018/6/28
Y1 - 2018/6/28
N2 - This paper explores various ways in which contemporary British English depicts degrees of animacy among nonhuman animals, and demonstrates the anthropocentric qualities of much discourse about animals. The first section reviews discussions of animacy in relevant research literature, highlighting how these often take for granted a categorical distinction between humans and other animals, before demonstrating how both corpus-assisted approaches to discourse analysis and developments in the analysis of animacy point to a more complex picture. The second section discusses the implications of recent work in social theory for understanding organisms, and their degrees of animacy, from the perspective of networks rather than hierarchies. The third section of the paper presents analyses of an electronically stored corpus of language about animals. Three analyses of naming terms, descriptors and verbal patterns associated with various non-human animals illustrate a range of ways in which their animacy is denoted and connoted. They also demonstrate the influence of discourse type and human purpose on depictions of animals and assumptions about their animacy.
AB - This paper explores various ways in which contemporary British English depicts degrees of animacy among nonhuman animals, and demonstrates the anthropocentric qualities of much discourse about animals. The first section reviews discussions of animacy in relevant research literature, highlighting how these often take for granted a categorical distinction between humans and other animals, before demonstrating how both corpus-assisted approaches to discourse analysis and developments in the analysis of animacy point to a more complex picture. The second section discusses the implications of recent work in social theory for understanding organisms, and their degrees of animacy, from the perspective of networks rather than hierarchies. The third section of the paper presents analyses of an electronically stored corpus of language about animals. Three analyses of naming terms, descriptors and verbal patterns associated with various non-human animals illustrate a range of ways in which their animacy is denoted and connoted. They also demonstrate the influence of discourse type and human purpose on depictions of animals and assumptions about their animacy.
KW - animacy
KW - animals
KW - anthropocentrism
KW - corpus assisted discourse analysis
U2 - 10.1075/ijolc.00008.sea
DO - 10.1075/ijolc.00008.sea
M3 - Journal article
VL - 5
SP - 224
EP - 247
JO - International Journal of Language and Culture
JF - International Journal of Language and Culture
SN - 2214-3157
IS - 2
ER -