Pesetsky, Jonathan2024-03-192024-03-192019-08-13https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3367185https://africarxiv.ubuntunet.net/handle/1/942https://doi.org/10.60763/africarxiv/895https://doi.org/10.60763/africarxiv/895https://doi.org/10.60763/africarxiv/895In this paper, I argue that the phenomenon of animacy override in Swahili arises from the interaction between a syntactic structure with multiple nominal heads and general principles of distributed morphology. This syntactic analysis narrows the possibilities for a semantic analysis of animacy, strongly suggesting an approach previously proposed for gender in Romance languages. Specifically, I argue that Swahili has an interpretable +animate feature which denotes a partial function which is defined only on animate predicates of type et and which denotes the identity function where it is defined.AnimacySwahiliNATURAL SCIENCES::Biology::Organism biology::Morphology