The variability of animacy in the lexicon of card games: the role of personification

This paper is devoted to the study of the variability of the categories of animacy/inanimacy, which is one of the fundamental grammatical categories in the Russian language. This category not only serves a formal syntactic function (determining the form of the accusative case) but also reflects the cognitive perception of living and non-living objects by native Russian speakers. However, the classification of specific lexical items within this category is often ambiguous, which indicates the complex interaction of semantics, grammar, and linguistic practice. One manifestation of such variability is observed in the nouns denoting card game elements: although semantically inanimate, these lexemes can function grammatically as animate nouns (e.g., бить туза – to beat the tuz ). Based on the data from the Russian National Corpus (RNC), this article analyzes a representative case of such variability — the nouns referring to card game elements, particularly the lexemes tuz and dzhoker . Despite their inherently inanimate referents in the real world, these lexemes may undergo cognitive personification in the gaming discourse, which leads to their grammatical animacy. The purpose of this study is to identify the patterns and factors that determine the choice of animate or inanimate grammatical form for the lexemes tuz and dzhoker . The conducted analysis confirms that the variability in animacy is manifested in the gaming lexicon of tuz and dzhoker, yet to varying degrees: the level of animacy of tuz is higher than that of dzhoker . An analysis of the influence of factors such as personification, type of meaning, and grammatical number on the choice of animate or inanimate forms has shown that, unlike the dzhoker , the tuz belongs to the category of lexemes whose animacy is strictly governed by explicit semantic and grammatical criteria.