Nelson, D and Vihman, V-A (2018) Bringing the toys to life: Animacy, reference, and anthropomorphism in Toy Story. International Journal of Language and Culture, 5 (2). pp. 203-223. ISSN 2214-3157
Abstract
In the children’s film Toy Story, toys spring to life when their human owners are away, creating an alternative world of transferred animacy relations signalled by visual and linguistic cues. The storylines and characters explore the nature of animacy and relationships between conspecifics and ‘others’. Our analysis focuses on the use of referring expressions as they reflect the animacy of their referents, as it develops and changes during the course of the narrative. We relate these findings to well-established scales of animacy which link our perception of the world to the categories imposed by language. We find that, as predicted by models of animacy proposed by Dahl (2008) and Yamamoto (1999), among others, shifts in reference – specifically from common noun to proper noun to pronoun, and from collective to individuated referents – reflect characters’ shifting conceptualisation of, and empathy with, each other. We argue that referring expressions are used at key points in the film script to subtly mediate accessible cues to animacy like eyes, speech and motion, and to guide viewers’ empathies and allegiances, extending our understanding of animacy beyond ordinary anthropocentrism.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | This is an author produced version of a paper published in International Journal of Language and Culture. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. |
Keywords: | film narrative; children's fiction; anthropomorphism; referential expressions; animacy |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures (Leeds) > School of Languages Cultures & Societies (Leeds) > Linguistics & Phonetics (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 09 Apr 2018 15:11 |
Last Modified: | 17 Jul 2018 10:40 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | John Benjamins Publishing |
Identification Number: | 10.1075/ijolc.00007.nel |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:129408 |