Elephants Who Marry Mice are Very Unusual

The Use of the Relative Pronoun Who with Nonhuman Animals

Bibliographic Data

ID12419290
AuthorsGaëtanelle Gilquin (0000-0001-7747-6443, corresponding author), George Jacobs, George M Jacobs
Year2006
Volume14
Issue1
Pages79-105
Publication date2006-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueSociety and Animals (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1063-1119 • E-ISSN: 1568-5306
PublisherBrill (PUBLISHER • NL)
DOI10.1163/156853006776137159
OpenAlexW1973385712
LanguageEN
Citations received17

This paper explores the use of the relative pronoun (who) with nonhuman animals. The paper looks at what dictionaries, an encyclopedia, grammars, publication manuals, newspapers, and news agencies say and do relative to this issue. In addition to investigating the views and practices of these authoritative publications, the study also searched a 100-million-word collection (corpus) of spoken and written English. The study found that while some reference works reject or ignore the use of (who) with nonhuman animals, other works discuss the possibility, and (who) does occur in the corpus with nonhuman animals. Explanations for such usage include psychological closeness with particular nonhuman animals and/or features shared with humans. The paper suggests that the use of (who) with nonhuman animals might play a role in promoting human attitudes and behaviors beneficial to fellow animals. However, it cautions that the correlation between language use, on the one hand, and attitudes and behaviors, on the other hand, is not a perfect one

Closeness · Linguistics · Media studies · Newspaper · Pronoun · Sociology · Human-Animal Interaction Studies · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Philosophy · Psychology · Swearing, Euphemism, Multilingualism

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