Inalienable possession

Nouns or nominal affixes in an inalienable possession relationship cannot exist independently or be "alienated" from their possessor.

However, if a language has such a distinction, kinship roles or body parts (or both) make up some of the entities that are inalienably possessed.

[10] It is impossible to say that a particular relationship is an example of inalienable possession without specifying the languages for which that holds true.

He states that "rather than being a semantically defined category, inalienability is more likely to constitute a morphosyntactic or morphophonological entity, one that owes its existence to the fact that certain nouns happened to be left out when a new pattern for marking attributive possession arose.

The distinction between alienable and inalienable possession is often marked by various morphosyntactic properties such as morphological markers and word order.

[16] French, for example, can use a postnominal possessor (the possessor (of) Jean occurs after the possessee the arm): lethebrasarmdeofJeanJeanle bras de Jeanthe arm of Jean'John's arm'(Guéron 2007: 590 (la))lethefrèrebrotherdeofJeanJeanle frère de Jeanthe brother of Jean'John's brother'lethelivrebookdeofJeanJeanle livre de Jeanthe book of Jean'John's book'In contrast, English generally uses a prenominal possessor (John's brother).

amahhousero-PetrusGEN-Petrusamah ro-Petrushouse GEN-Petrus‘Petrus' house'(Dol 1999: 97)Another way for languages to distinguish between alienable and inalienable possession is to have one noun class that cannot appear without an explicit possessor.

In (12), the same phenomenon is found with the inalienable noun ookmis (grandmother), which requires the possessor morpheme n to be grammatical.

niPOSSnikarmni nikPOSS arm'my arm'* nikarm* nik{} arm'(an) arm'(Nichols & Nyholm 1995: 138)nookmisPOSS-grandmothernookmisPOSS-grandmother'my grandmother'* ookmisgrandmother* ookmis{} grandmother'(a) grandmother'(Nichols & Nyholm 1995: 189)Hawaiian uses different prepositions to mark possession, depending on the noun's alienability: a (alienable of) is used to indicate alienable possession as in (13a), and o (inalienable of) indicates inalienable possession as in (13b).

[26] Spanish also uses a definite article (el, los, la, or las) to indicate inalienable possession for body parts.

[28] One subtle grammatical distinction is the postnominal genitive construction, which is normally reserved for inalienable relational nouns.

LesTheenfantschildrenonthavelevéraisedlathemainhandLes enfants ont levé la mainThe children have raised the hand'The children raised the hand' (Vergnaud and Zubizarreta 1992: 596 (1))Syntactically, Noam Chomsky proposed that some genitive or possessive cases originate as part of the determiner in the underlying structure.

On the other hand, the interpretation of alienable constructions such as 1a can be ambiguous since it is not restricted by the same properties of anaphoric binding.

[30] According to the hypothesis, anaphoric binding in inalienable possession constructions relates to the theta-features that a language assigns to its determiners.

[16] The hypothesis predicts that inalienable possession constructions exist in languages that assign variable theta-features to its determiners and that inalienable possession constructions do not exist in languages that lack variable theta-feature assignment.

[16] Therefore, inalienable possession is predicted to exist in Romance languages and also Russian but not in English or Hebrew.

That hypothesis, however, does not account for verbs allowing reflexive anaphora (Jean se lave 'Jean washes himself').

[16] The two links of a lexical chain must obey the same constraints as anaphora, which accounts for the locality restrictions on inalienable construals.

[37] Landau's analysis is made on the basis of several properties possessives in the data case in Romance languages.

The possessor raises to the specifier of VP, which is seen in the surface structure Gilles lui a lavé la figure.

GillesGilles[TP Gillesluihim.DAT[VP luiia lavéwasheda lavéla figurethe face[DP ti la figure]]]Gilles lui {a lavé} {la figure}Gilles him.DAT washed {the face}[{TP Gilles} {[VP luii} {a lavé} {[DP ti la figure]]]}'Gilles washed his face'(Guéron 2007: 611 (100b))According to Guéron, a benefit of the hypothesis is that it is consistent with principles of syntactic movement such as locality of selection and c-command.

If the position to which it must move is already filled, as with a transitive verb like see, the possessor cannot raise, and the sentence is correctly predicted to be ungrammatical.

[16] *   GilGil[TP GiljNOMra'asaw[VP tj ra'a le-Rinato Rina[DP le-Rina*DATettheet ha-panimfaceha panim]]]ACC* Gil ra'a le-Rina et ha-panim{} Gil saw {to Rina} the face{} {[TP Gilj} {[VP tj ra'a} {[DP le-Rina} et {ha panim]]]}{} NOM {} *DAT {} ACC'Gil saw Rina's face'(Guéron 2007: 613 (109))However, some languages like Russian do not have to raise the DP possessor and can leave it in situ and so it is unclear why the possessor would ever have to raise.

Additionally, both kinship and body part nouns behave similarly in sentences with VP pronominalization.

[42] Because the possessor and the possessee have a close conceptual relationship, their relative positions with a sentence reflect that, and there is little distance between them.

That is demonstrated in Yagaria, a Papuan language that marks alienable possession by a free form pronoun as in (33a).

[45] The table below shows the number of times that each noun occurred with or without a possessor in texts from the German Goethe-Corpus of the works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

[41] That could be explained by Zipf's Law in which the familiarity or the frequency of an occurrence motivates the linguistic simplification of the concept.

Here, the Initial Control Theory can also be generally expanded to the whole Polynesian language family in terms of better describing the "alienability" of possession.

Words that are marked with the o possessive markers are nouns that are: However, Wilson's theory falls short of properly categorizing a few miscellaneous items such as articles of clothing and furniture that his theory would incorrectly predict to be marked with the possessive particle a.