Can inanimate objects sit

A potato is an inanimate object. These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'inanimate. Send us feedback. See more words from the same century. Accessed 12 Nov. More Definitions for inanimate. See the full definition for inanimate in the English Language Learners Dictionary. Nglish: Translation of inanimate for Spanish Speakers. Britannica English: Translation of inanimate for Arabic Speakers. Subscribe to America's largest dictionary and get thousands more definitions and advanced search—ad free!

Log in Sign Up. Save Word. Definition of inanimate. Example Sentences Learn More About inanimate. The response in 15 is taken from my dataset of spontaneous speech. The child had gone to lie on the bed without our knowledge. Ameka also points out that in Likpe a Kwa language spoken in Ghana inanimate Figures such as pens, sticks, tubers, bottles, that have an elongated shape and are clearly in a horizontal position on a surface e. According to Ameka, the contexts in which the lying verb can be applied to objects in Likpe are restricted.

For example, when there are multiple objects in different orientations and Likpe speakers intend to show contrast in the positions of the multiple Figures e. Rather it has to do with whether the object has a canonical part to support it on its base or lacks a salient dimension e. Kutscher and Schultze-Berndt note that in colloquial German locative descriptions, objects lacking salient dimensions are also described as lying. It can be tentatively argued that the fact that horizontality is not an important construal of the Gur and Kwa languages suggests an areal typological phenomenon.

However, such a conclusion requires further verification with data from other languages in the linguistic area. That is because the latter two Grounds branch and bus top are not perceived by the speakers as appropriate or natural places for someone to be lying on. In the community, there are plastered roofs which are specially designed for people to climb up and rest or sleep on see Figure 5 below, GUR 12 when the weather becomes hot at certain times of the year usually March-May.

When people are in a lying posture on this type of roof they could be described as lying because these roofs are made especially for this purpose and are thus considered as canonical. However, these two senses can always be differentiated by the adjuncts in the locative construction. This is the only posture verb that is restricted to the description of human postures.

It has no extension to the description of the location of inanimates. This is the type of posture assumed by contestants for a chieftaincy title or complainants and defendants who appear before their traditional chiefs in their palaces. As observed during the fieldwork, failure to assume such a posture before the chief is considered a serious offence and disrespect for authority. These inferences are however, not built into the linguistic structure of the sentences that give rise to them cf.

Levinson For instance, Newman points out that if the lying auxiliary occurs in a sentence in Chitimacha it ascribes the notions of insult, sarcasm, disparagement, joking, abuse, and defiance, while the standing auxiliary shows respect. Figure 3: Sitting posture of constants for chieftaincy title marking deference at a palace. In these two situations, if the person is seated with his feet or legs suspended or not supported on the Ground e.

The corresponding expressions are given below. Figure 5: Picture stimuli representing sitting straddling and non-straddling postures. That is because speakers construe these straddling postures as location on a high ground. The relevant semantic feature for the use of the verb is for the person sitting to have his feet touching and in contact with the surface of the earth while remaining in a sitting posture.

It is not used to describe the posture of animate non-humans e. However, in the folktale data, animal characters such as rabbits, monkeys, tigers, and hyenas are sometimes described as sitting when the narrator personifies them with human attributes.

Example 29 below describes Mr. Leopard arrived to question him about a theft case in his Mr. This usage is permissible because the animals in the folktale genre are personified and therefore are perceived as behaving like humans.

This makes it possible for them to assume the sitting posture in the folktale discourse. Rabbit and his wife and his children were sitting at the front yard of their house conversing when Mr. For example, Lemmens points out that in Dutch when speakers perceive the postures of animals to be sufficiently similar to that of humans they are coded with the verb zitten. Thus, in Dutch, when cats, dogs, cows, have their hindlegs bent and their bottom touching the ground they are described as sitting.

Similarly, Ameka reports that in Likpe, si the verb for coding a sitting posture applies to cats and dogs resting on their behind. Thus, speakers do not consider this posture of animals as sitting and will argue that animals do not sit but squat.

Smaller animals such as rats, mouse, and frogs when resting on their hindlegs are described as squatting. For an illustration, see Figure 1 above GUR The exact expressions that speakers used to describe these scenes are given in examples 30 - In other words, the vertical length of any entity that is comparable to a human height or higher can access se but if this is lower the verb can no longer be used.

However, many of the semantic properties in Tzeltal are Figure-centred with virtually nothing on the Ground or the nature of the spatial relation. In her discussion of the Tzeltal phenomena, it is suggested that elevation does not play any major role as information on the elevation of the Figures was neither mentioned nor commented on but left implicit.

She explains that a shirt on the floor will attract the use of chumuchu but tsula is grammatically not acceptable in this context. Instead, a shirt on a tabletop tsula can apply.

Given these patterns of usage, one might assume that there is a clear division of labour between the two verbs. However, Guirardello-Damian : points out that, it is when the Figure is inanimate that the difference between the two verbs becomes more marked, less so when the Figure is animate.

A clear case of elevation where tsula is used but chumuchu is denied, as Guirardello-Damian shows in his discussion, is when human beings or animals are lying in a hammock.

It is therefore hard to point to any feature of elevation in this case since the foot is assumed to be at the floor level. Further, in Trumai, examples of scenes with a ball on a tabletop, a stick lying on a tabletop, and a glass on its side on a bench are all described with chumuchu but not tsula see Guirardello-Damian : , suggesting that speakers use these verbs freely. For example, if the person is not standing on his feet but is supported on the Ground on his hands or head with his body projected in an upright position he is not described as standing, since he is not resting on his feet.

Instead, he would be described as located inversely on the Ground with the expression in The following two sections thus only talk about the former two verbs. It can be used to describe the lying postures of animals like cats, dogs, cows when they are lying curled on one side of their body on the ground earth. In 36 a dog saw a snake in a thicket near the place where we usually gather for our folktale narration sessions and one speaker reported this to us.

Notice that in all these examples the posture of these animate entities is construed as oriented horizontally on one side of their bodies on the Ground which is similar to human postures. The elongation of their bodies is also an important component that contributes to defining their lying posture.

Figure 7: A picture scene of a leopard lying on tree branch. In this context, focal advantage or perspective is an important construal influencing their choice of verb. Thus, animals e. All kinds of birds domestic and wild, small and large are described as standing once they have legs, as illustrated in Thus, in Dutch, their overall shape like a crouched posture of a human is of importance.

Even smaller animals like mice, rats, black moles, are all characterised as standing. However, animals like hedgehogs whose legs are not quite visible or insects such as ants are described as lying because speakers often perceive them as not having legs. Similarly, when goats climb up, and stand on the trunk of low lying trees or tree stumps, yagi is used to predicate their location as attested in Consider the following examples taken from real context and spontaneous speech data that describe objects in lying positions.

It would appear that the crucial determining factor is that the shape of the Figure must be elongated. However, speakers also apply the verb to describe the location of a ball on the ground earth , as the following example attests. Figure 8: Eggs located on floor, a scene from the Gur positional picture photos stimulus. Recall that the choice of any of the verbs of elevation is based on the relevant schematizations of the elevated scene with respect to the Figure properties that the speaker profiles.

In the posture typology, it is argued see, for example, Lemmens Dutch , that the relative size could be a determining factor for speakers to perceive bigger objects e. Instead, the absence of any canonical base support of the Figures provides a strong motivation for speakers to describe them as lying cf. These are permanently located entities. The following utterances, were spontaneously collected in context.

In 49 one of my folktale narrators describes the location of his farmland to his colleague who enquired about this. The description of the dam in 50 was an utterance in answer to an inquiry about the location of the the Vea dam not far from Bolga. The context in 51 is that we lost our way while travelling to one of the villages to record folktales and we asked a man for directions and he produced that utterance in response. Permanently located landmarks such as water bodies tend to be described as lying in some languages, for example, Trumai see Guirardello-Damian In Dutch, Lemmens and Perrez observe a similar usage with this type of Figure and even suggest in their findings that French learners of Dutch often have difficulty in understanding this extended usage.

Other geographic entities that are described as lying because of horizontal expansion include forests, unhabited spaces, and sand. Atintono , The ability of the Figure to maintain a stable upright position requires rigidity of its body.

Thus, flexible, non-rigid objects such as ropes, clothes, or empty sacks cannot be described as standing since they lack this feature. Again, we see that what is at issue here is an image schema triggering conceptual scanning upward, as Serra Borneto argues, so that the human posture of standing is transferred to describe the location of non-animate entities.

The semantics of the verb says nothing about any other property of the Figure except that it is located inversely. The explanation speakers offered is that such inverse orientations are inappropriate for the location of the objects.

It turns out that all container-like objects e. This feature is in contrast with other languages e. Recall that, as pointed out in section 5. This is therefore one of the situations where verticality is cancelled out or demoted in favour of a non-canonical locative description.

What is still valid here is that if any of these objects is located on an elevated Ground, the choice will fall on one of the verbs of elevation. It has been shown that the basic meanings of these verbs concern the actual human postures of lying, sitting, and standing respectively. The posture meanings associated with humans are considered basic because their use to describe human postures is what is perceived as the default usage by speakers.

In addition, the interpretation of the orientation of other animate non-human and inanimate enties are often interpreted in terms of human postures. That is, speakers associate the prototypical standing and lying postures of humans as being in a vertical orientation and projecting from or being in a horizontal position on a Ground.

These image schemas are extended to code these other entities located in space. Lemmens , Ameka Ameka, K. The Linguistic Construction of Space in Ewe. Cognitive Linguistics 6: Picture series for positional verbs; Eliciting the verbal component in locative descriptions. Manual for the field Season. Nijmegen: Max Planck institute fur Psycholinguistik, language and Cognition group. Linguistics Introduction: the typology and semantics of locative predicates: posturals, positionals and other beasts.

Atintono, A. The syntax and semantics of Gurene posture verbs. University of Cologne, Germany. Aspectual Properties of Gurene Positional Verbs. University of Maryland, USA. Brindle, A. In this case, the usage is colloquial, which is why it tends to appear in verbal transcripts or in asides within titles. If you want to label the usage rhetorically, it's a kind of anthropomorphism , which gives an inanimate object human qualities. The phrase does seem to imply that the mistake was made by the building sign.

However as you say inanimate objects do very little voluntarily, so that can't be true. If the sign itself didn't make the mistake then the mistake must be elsewhere — probably with whoever specified it or who made it. But this is quite a mouthful, and doesn't really exhaust all the possible reasons that the wording on the signs might be wrong. In this context, though, we don't care who made the mistake or why it was made, we just want to spot the mistakes. It's probably more correct to say Building signs which have standard Since it is followed by a semicolon, it should be an independent phrase with a subject and a verb.

There is no verb. It might be reworded as:. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. Asked 2 years ago. Active 2 years ago.

Viewed times. Improve this question. Please see this answer about "thru traffic" versus "through traffic": english. The highlighted phrase sounds absolutely fine and is grammatically correct in context. Your title is different from the questions in your post.