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The article offers the authors's response on comments made to their article on typical and atypical type-shifts in animacy. They argue that there is one-to-one mapping from conceptual animacy to linguistic phrasing in production. They say that a conceptual animacy hierarchy is not reflected in a linguist animacy hierarchy. They also explain the relation between animacy and semantic roles.

We examine the effects of morphosyntactic marking and selectional restrictions of predicates on conceptual and grammatical animacy. We argue in favour of animacy as an ontological category with human, animate and inanimate entities representing discrete subtypes in the domain of entities. We distinguish between conceptual animacy, which is a gradient notion, and grammatical animacy, for which discrete, binary oppositions are needed. The main aim of this paper is to argue for a distinction between overt and covert type shifts in animacy. On the one hand, overt shifts are linguistic solutions to type mismatches in the grammar. Crucially, these type shifts do not involve a shift in conceptual animacy. Covert animacy shifts, on the other hand, brought about by selectional restrictions or by the linguistic context in general, do involve a proper type shift in conceptual animacy. By making explicit the relation between the gradience of conceptual and the discreteness of grammatical animacy, and by exploring the distinction between covert and overt type shifts that involve animacy, we hope to gain a deeper understanding of animacy and its effects on language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]