Inalienable possession

This article is about a linguistic category. For the property category, see Inalienable possessions.
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In linguistics, inalienable possession[1] (abbreviated INAL) is a type of possession in which a noun is obligatorily possessed by its possessor. Nouns or nominal affixes in an inalienable possession relationship cannot exist independently or be "alienated" from their possessor.[2] Inalienable nouns include body parts (such as leg, which is necessarily "someone's leg" even if it is severed from the body), kinship terms (such as mother), and part-whole relations (such as top).[3] Many languages reflect the distinction but vary in how they mark inalienable possession.[4] Cross-linguistically, inalienability correlates with many morphological, syntactic, and semantic properties.

In general, the alienable–inalienable distinction is an example of a binary possessive class system in which a language distinguishes two kinds of possession (alienable and inalienable). The alienability distinction is the most common kind of binary possessive class system, but it is not the only one.[4] Some languages have more than two possessive classes. In Papua New Guinea, for example, Anêm has at least 20 classes, and Amele has 32.[5][4]

Statistically, 15–20% of the world's languages have obligatory possession.[6]

  1. ^ "Haspelmath Possessives" (PDF). www.eva.mpg.de.
  2. ^ Matthews, P. H. (2007). Inalienable possession. Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acref/9780199202720.001.0001. ISBN 9780199202720.
  3. ^ Lichtenberk, Frantisek; Vaid, Jyotsna; Chen, Hsin-Chin (2011). "On the interpretation of alienable vs. inalienable possession: A psycholinguistic investigation". Cognitive Linguistics. 22 (4): 659–689. doi:10.1515/cogl.2011.025. S2CID 143993134. ProQuest 919350399.
  4. ^ a b c Nichols, Johanna; Bickel, Balthasar. "Possessive Classification". World Atlas of Language Structures. Retrieved 2011-02-26.
  5. ^ Nichols, Johanna; Bickel, Balthasar (2013). Dryer, Matthew S; Haspelmath, Martin (eds.). "Possessive Classification". The World Atlas of Language Structures Online.
  6. ^ Nichols, Johanna; Bickel, Balthasar. "Feature/Obligatory Possessive Inflection". World Atlas of Language Structures. Retrieved 2011-03-06.