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Is the adnominal possessive construction different for alienable and inalienable nouns?

Summary

Is there a morpho-syntactic difference in attributive possession that can be ascribed to alienability?

This feature applies to constructions with both pronominal and nominal possessors.

Typically, inalienable possession applies to the semantic domains of body parts and kinship, but it is sometimes found in other categories that do not align perfectly with the canonical notion of 'alienability', such as part-whole relationships other than body parts, social relationships other than kinship, or things inherently linked to a person (e.g. a person's voice, mental states, or other attributes).

This feature targets splits in possessive marking where different classes of possessum are associated with different constructions, and where one of those possessum classes includes body parts and/or kinship terms, and possibly other categories that have strong semantic associations with their owners, social relationships, or part-whole relationships.

Procedure

If there are two or more possessive constructions which vary according to the semantic class of the noun being possessed or the nature of the relationship between possessor and possessed,
And the difference in the construction does not consist solely of a difference in noun class/gender markers, or other classifier systems such as numeral classifiers that also apply to these categories of nouns in the same way in non-possessive constructions,
And the 'inalienable' semantic class associated with one of these strategies contains at least body part terms or at least kinship terms, then code 1.
If there are not multiple possessive constructions, or if there are multiple possessive constructions that do not vary based on semantic class of the possessum, code 0.
If you code a 1 for this feature, please use the comment field to provide a very brief description of the morphosyntactic distinction between alienable and inalienable possession.

Examples

Luiseño (ISO 639-3: lui, Glottolog: luis1253)

Luiseño possessive constructions are formed by attaching a possessive pronominal prefix (e.g. meaning ‘my’, ‘your’, etc.) to the possessed noun. A suffix -ki is also attached to the possessed noun when the relationship between possessor and possessed is alienable: ‘my sinew (in my body)’ = no-ta̱; ‘my sinew (for the bow I am making)’ = no-ta̱-ki (Grune 1997: 4). Luiseño would be coded 1.

Nakanai (ISO 639-3: nak, Glottolog: naka1262)

In Nakanai the inalienable possession construction requires suffixes that indicate the person and number of the possessor, while possessors are indicated only with phonologically independent forms in the alienable possession construction. Nakanai is coded 1.

la  luma   taku
ART house  my
‘my house’

la   lima-gu
ART  hand-my
‘my hand’ (Johnston 1980: 168)

Spanish (ISO 639-3: spa, Glottolog: stan1288)

Like many languages, Spanish has multiple possessive constructions, but each is compatible with the semantic classes of nouns typically associated with inalienable possession (body parts and kinship terms) as well as other nouns generally. There is no distinction that splits according to alienability. Spanish would be 0.

mi dedo               el  dedo   de Ana
my finger             DET finger of Ana
‘my finger’           ‘Ana's finger’

mi hermano            el  hermano de Ana
my brother            DET brother of Ana
‘my brother’          ‘Ana's brother’

mi libro              el  libro de Ana
my book               DET book  of Ana
‘my book’             ‘Ana's book’

(personal knowledge)

References

Grune, Dick. 1997. A survey of the Uto-Aztecan language Luiseño. (Unpublished manuscript.)

Johnston, Raymond L. 1980. Nakani of New Britain: The grammar of an Oceanic language. (Pacific Linguistics B, 70.) Canberra: Australian National University.

Related Features

Patron

Hannah J. Haynie