Exploring Animacy: An Example from Macbeth
Shakespeare flouts expectations of animacy in the Second Witch's spell.
While I finish pulling together a longer post on animacy, I want to share an interesting pattern with animacy and possession:1
My leg is correct; ??the leg of mine sounds strange.
The cat’s leg and the leg of the cat are both correct, but the former is preferred.
The table’s leg and the leg of the table are both correct.
Animacy is a feature of nouns that are living or sentient. Some languages make multiple (grammatically marked) distinctions according to a gradient hierarchy. For English, the simple relevant scale is:
human > animate > inanimate
Animacy is a factor in English pronoun selection. If the pronoun refers to an animate noun, then he, she, they (singular), or a different personal pronoun is used. If the noun referenced is inanimate, the pronoun is it. (The same distinction is made between animate who and inanimate what.) In the case of plural pronouns, however, animacy distinction is lost—they in plural form refers to any noun antecedent.
Beyond pronoun selection, sussing out a clear grammatical distinction in English that is sensitive to animacy becomes tricky. However, we can observe in the example above, repeated here, the systematic influence of animacy when the preposition of shows possession. In these examples, the higher animacy a referent has, the less preferable it is to use the of construction.
My leg is correct; ?the leg of mine sounds strange.
The cat’s leg and the leg of the cat are both correct, but the former is preferred.
The table’s leg and the leg of the table are both correct.
Animacy doesn’t fully determine how possession is expressed, but it is a major factor, as shown by a strong statistical bias.2
As soon as I read about this animacy-governed difference, I recalled the Second Witch’s spell from Macbeth:
Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog,
Adder's fork and blind-worm's sting,
Lizard's leg and owlet's wing,
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.
Shakespeare flouts the default animate construction (newt’s eye and frog’s toe, etc.), opting instead for the dispreferred of-phrase order. The employment of a defamiliarizing, low-frequency phrase structure is especially suitable here, inside a witch’s incantation. The extra effort needed to process the phrases adds to the magical power of the words.
This illustration of manipulating the expression of possession is just one way a writer can play with expectations regarding animacy.
Rosenbach, Anette. “Animacy versus Weight as Determinants of Grammatical Variation in English.” Language, vol. 81, no. 3, 2005, pp. 613–44. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4489967. Accessed 21 Mar. 2023. Although this is where I found useful discussion of the alternation, credit for the original observation may be due to Mette-Catherine Jahn Sorheim, whose unpublished 1980 University of Oslo thesis I unfortunately cannot find.
Ibid.