Abstract
Although animacy is widely held to play a prominent part in grammar as well as in language use, to the best of our knowledge there is of yet no comprehensive theory on the role of animacy in language. The aim of this project is to develop such a theory. In order to investigate the role of animacy we will combine typological, experimental and theoretical research. We believe that Optimality Theory (OT), being a linguistic theory of markedness, will allow us to account for marked and unmarked patterns of animacy as reflected in frequency (in corpora), cross-linguistic frequency (typology), and production and processing ease (experiments). A bidirectional version of OT, which relates syntax and semantics, seems useful to analyze both production and perception data with one and the same grammar. Our ultimate aim is an analysis of the role of animacy in language that is linguistically as well as cognitively sound.