Inalienable possession

In linguistics, inalienable possession refers to the linguistic properties of certain nouns or nominal morphemes based on the their always being possessed. The semantic underpinning is that entities like body parts and relatives do not exist apart from a possessor. For example, a hand implies (someone's) hand, even if it is severed from the whole body. Likewise, a father implies (someone's) father. Such entities are inalienably possessed. Other things, like most artifacts and objects in nature, may be possessed or not. When these latter types of entities are possessed, the possession is alienable. Generally speaking, alienable possession is used for tangible things which you might cease to own or possess at some point, such as trade (e.g., "my money"), whereas inalienable possession refers to a perpetual relationship which cannot be readily severed (e.g., "my mother"). Many languages reflect this distinction, although in different ways.

One way some languages distinguish between alienable and inalienable nominals is to have one class that cannot appear without an explicit possessor. Technically this is called obligatory possession, but linguists often use the term inalienable possession to mean this. For example, Ojibwe, an Algonquian language in the Great Lakes area of the US and Canada, has a class of words that must have explicit possessors. (In the technical language of Algonquianists these are called dependent nouns.) The following examples are from Minnesota Ojibwe.

ninik 'my arm' but not *nik '(an) arm'

nookmis 'my grandmother', but not *ookmis '(a) grandmother'

Statistically somewhere between 15-20% of the world's languages have obligatory possession.

More widespread are differences in syntactic construction, depending on alienability. An example of such a difference is found in the formation of possessives in Dholuo, a Luo (Nilo-Saharan) language, widely-spoken in Kenya and Tanzania.

Examples

The first example is a case of alienable possession, as the bone is not part of the dog.

cogo guok

bone dog

'the dog's bone' (which it is eating)

The following is however an example of inalienable possession, the bone being part of the cow:

cok dhiang'

bone (construct state) cow

'a cow bone'

Hawaiian is commonly cited as an example of a language with an alienability difference, because it uses a different preposition to mark possession depending on alienability.

nā iwi a Pua 'Pua's bones (as the chicken bones she is eating)'

the bones of Pua

nā iwi o Pua 'Pua's [own] bones'

the bones of Pua

However, the distinction between a '(alienable) of' and o '(inalienable) of' is used for other semantic distinctions less clearly attributable to the basic alienability distinction except in metaphorical ways.

ke kanaka a ke ali‘i 'the subject [controlled or appointed by] the chief'

the man of the king

ke kanaka o ke ali‘i 'the [hereditary] subject of the chief'

the man of the king

ka lei a Pua 'Pua's lei [to sell]'

the lei of Pua

ka lei o Pua 'Pua's lei [to wear]'

the lei of Pua

(All examples from Elbert and Pukui, pg. 139.)

More subtle cases of syntactic patterns sensitive to alienability are found in many languages, even some Indo-European languages. For example, French, Spanish, and German use a definite article rather than the possessive with body parts.

French

Il ouvrit ses lettres. 'He opens his letters.'

he opens his letters

Il ouvrit les yeux. 'He opens his eyes.'

he opens the eyes

Spanish

Limpió su mesa. 'He cleaned his table.'

he-cleaned his table

Se limpió la cara. 'He cleaned his face.'

REFLEXIVE he-cleaned the face

German

Er wäscht sein Auto. 'He is washing his car.'

he washes his car

Er wäscht sich die Hände. 'He is washing his hands.'

he washes REFLEXIVE the hands

But because the distinction between alienable and inalienable is rooted in semantics, in languages like English where there are no morphological or syntactic distinctions sensitive to alienability, ambiguities are easy to find. For example, the phrase "she has her father's eyes" could conceivably have two very different meanings: that her eyes resemble her father's, which is an example of inalienable possession, or that she is in actual physical possession of them (she has cut them out and is holding them), which is an example of alienable possession.

As an example of a possessive class system

In general, the alienable-inalienable distinction is an example of a binary possessive class system, i.e., a language in which two kinds of possession are distinguished (alienable and inalienable) instead of just one, as in English. The alienability distinction is the most common kind of binary possessive class system, but it is not the only one. Furthermore, some languages have more than just two different possessive classes: on the more extreme end of the scale, the Anêm language of Papua New Guinea has at least 20.

Variation between languages

Generally speaking, which kind of relationship (alienable or inalienable) is described with which kind of possessive construction is somewhat arbitrary, and in this respect it is similar to noun classes. For example, the French language is well known for having two grammatical genders, masculine and feminine. Words which refer to objects that have actual biological sex, such as specific people, will be predictably classified, but objects which have no inherent gender (such as a table) will be arbitrarily classified, and so the German counterpart of a masculine French noun will not necessarily be masculine in German. This is analogous to possessive classes: whatever the distinction (alienability or something more exotic), the specifics will vary from language to language, and a relationship expressed with e.g. an alienable possessive in one language may be expressed with an inalienable possessive in another language.

In the particular case of inalienable possession, there is considerable variation between languages. It may be used for family relationships, body parts, and authorship, among other things. It is therefore often impossible to say that a particular relationship is an example of inalienable possession without specifying the languages for which that holds true. Bernd Heine argues that the categories of inalienability are so variable because of processes of linguistic change: "rather than being a semantically defined category, inalienability is more likely to constitute a morpho-syntactic 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."

External links

• A map of the world's languages colored by possessive classification complexity from the World Atlas of Language Structures.