ANIMACY, TRANSITIVITY, AND READER RECEPTION: A CORPUS-BASED ECOLINGUISTIC STUDY OF ROBERT MACFARLANE'S IS A RIVER ALIVE?
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.68156/zjw05119Keywords:
Animacy, Corpus Linguistics, Ecolinguistics, Environmental Discourse, Generation Z, Rights of Nature, Robert Macfarlane, TransitivityAbstract
Rivers are conventionally treated in English discourse as inanimate resources bodies to be measured, dammed, and managed rather than beings with standing of their own. This study asks whether literary language can reverse that convention, and whether such a reversal is measurable rather than merely impressionistic. Using a corpus-based ecolinguistic approach, the study analyses the complete 106,649-word corpus of Robert Macfarlane's Is a River Alive? (2025) through the combined lenses of Arran Stibbe's Stories-We-Live-By framework, Hallidayan transitivity, and Robin Wall Kimmerer's grammar of animacy. Word frequency, keyword, collocational, and n-gram analyses were generated through a custom Python natural language processing (NLP) pipeline built on the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) and benchmarked against the British National Corpus; 200 concordance lines were qualitatively coded in NVivo; and a Linguistic Perception Questionnaire was administered to 150 Generation Z university students to test how readers respond to the text's grammatical strategies. Rivers were assigned the animate relative pronoun who over the inanimate which at a ratio of 8.5:1, the inverse of general English usage, and occupied the grammatical Actor role in over half of subject clauses through mental, verbal, and behavioural rather than purely material processes. Readers broadly endorsed the ethical implications of this language (82% agreed ecocide should be treated as a crime) more readily than its grammatical premises (49% were comfortable with the pronoun who for a river), and endorsement correlated positively with eco-anxiety (r = .52, p < .001) and varied by gender and faculty. The findings position literary animacy language as a measurable form of ecological resistance and carry implications for environmental communication, language pedagogy, and the Rights of Nature movement.
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Appendix: Python/NLTK Analysis Pipeline
The full Phase One pipeline described in section 3.1 is reproduced below for reproducibility. The script was run against the complete plain-text corpus of Is a River Alive? (106,649 word-tokens after punctuation filtering, matching the n_tokens value in Table 2) using Python 3.12 and NLTK 3.8, and produces the frequency, log-likelihood keyword, animacy-pronoun, collocation (both adjacency-based and window-based), and n-gram statistics reported in section 4. Section 3a additionally requires a reference-corpus frequency list (word, freq columns; e.g. derived from the BNC written component) supplied at REFERENCE_FREQ_PATH.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Natasha Mustafa, Marya Sarwar, Nida Ashiq, Shumaila (Author)
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