Volume 61, Issue 6 - Special Issue: Re-assessing the explanatory potential of the alienability contrast; Guest Editors: An Van linden and Françoise Rose

This introductory article outlines the central topic of the present special issue, viz. the contrast between alienable and inalienable possession, and how this contrast is reflected in the grammars and lexicons of natural languages. It sketches the historical background of the alienability contrast in the linguistic literature and points to a number of biases that need to be overcome in order to (1) advance our understanding of the contrast and (2) face the limits of its explanatory potential. Specifically, the present introduction, as well as the contributions to the present issue, proposes to move beyond prototypical possessive relationships (ownership, part-whole, and kinship relations), prototypical possessor categories (human possessors) as well as prototypical possessee categories (artifacts, body-parts and kin). In addition, the issue contains three contributions dealing with Amazonian languages, thus filling in an important gap in previous crosslinguistic studies on possession. The data presented in the special issue show that many morphosyntactic phenomena that have been explained in terms of the alienability contrast – or are amenable to such explanations – cannot be reduced to it, and are sometimes even better described without recourse to alienability at all. The present article thus concludes that the alienability contrast is at best regarded as a heuristic tool in exploring linguistic data, and cautions that, if used as the only explanatory principle, it could actually hamper an adequate description of the data.

In this work we are presenting a database structure to encode the phenomenon of differential possession across languages, considering noun possession classes and possessive constructions as independent but linked. We show how this structure can be used to study different dimensions of possession: semantics, noun valence, and possessive constructions. We present preliminary survey results from a global sample of 120 languages and show that there is a universal semantic core in both inalienable and non-possessible noun classes. Inalienables are centered on body parts and kinship. Non-possessibles are centered on animals, humans, and natural elements.

Like many other Oceanic and Kanak languages of New Caledonia, Zuanga-Yuanga [ZY] has classifiers restricted to the possession of nouns denoting food, drink, animals and plants; it also has dichotomous direct and indirect adnominal possessive constructions, which are generally labeled inalienable or alienable in the Oceanic literature. These terms refer to a distinction between close versus distant structural marking, which do not strictly correlate with lexical-semantic categories. For instance, kinship nouns are split over the two types of constructions, distinguishing reference from address kinship terms, not in terms of semantic distinctions between close versus distant kinship types. The split for body-part nouns is between directly possessed dedicated terms and indirectly possessed metaphorical body terms, not in terms of permanent versus removable parts, or temporary body properties. In ZY possessive constructions correlate with fairly strict possessee noun classes belonging to one single structural class (directly or indirectly marked). Only a limited number of nouns denoting parts-of-whole have alternate constructions expressing different semantic relations to the possessed noun.

This article focuses on possession marking in Piaroa, a Jodï-Sáliban language spoken along the Middle Orinoco River on the Venezuelan-Colombian border. Based on a corpus of first-hand fieldwork data and building on previous descriptions of Piaroa possession, I show that Piaroa nouns can be divided into four main possessive noun classes based not only on the alienability (i.e., obligatorily possessed vs. optionally possessed) contrast but also based on construction types (i.e., directly possessed vs. indirectly possessed). This article thus contributes to our crosslinguistic understanding of possession constructions and possessive noun classes by showing that alienability is not a sufficient criterion to account for the different possessive classes and splits in Piaroa adnominal possessive constructions, which require positing two concurrent but distinct systems of possessive classification.

This article presents an original analysis of possession in Mojeño Trinitario, an Arawak language, teasing apart the levels of lexical possessive noun classes, morphological derivation between noun classes, and adnominal possessive constructions. The three possessive noun classes (obligatorily prefixed, optionally prefixed and non-prefixable) do not exactly correspond to the three possessive noun classes of the traditional analysis of Arawak languages, as in the analysis proposed here some of the traditionally called “alienable” nouns, i.e. nouns occurring as either possessed or unpossessed, are classified as non-prefixable nouns because they need some additional derivational morphology to be prefixable. The two adnominal possessive constructions (basic, through prefixation and modification; and indirect, via a generic possessive noun) are described, and their distribution is discussed. The article then addresses the question of how the notion of “alienability contrast” could explain the phenomena described, at either the lexical or phrasal level. In the process, it offers frequency counts on how often nouns of the different possessive classes occur as possessed in discourse, and it discusses whether the three noun classes are open or closed classes. It concludes that the alienability contrast is at best only a partial explanation for the expression of possession in Mojeño Trinitario. This article ends by developing how this innovative account of possession in Mojeño Trinitario applies to other Arawak languages.

This article investigates the nature and behavior of independent, bound and deverbal nouns at various levels of linguistic organization in Harakmbut (isolate, Peru), and assesses the explanatory potential of the alienability contrast for the data observed. While the distinction between bound and independent nouns is to a great extent motivated by the conceptual distinction between inalienably and alienably possessed items, the behavior of bound and independent nouns in adnominal possession is not. Whereas independent (and deverbal) nouns use a genitive-marked two-word construction, bound nouns can use the same one, when keeping their noun prefix, or they can use a genitive-marked one-word construction, in which they drop their prefix. It is thus argued that there is no alienability split in adnominal possession, that is, there is no coding split according to which bound nouns behave fully differently from independent nouns. This is supported by the finding that bound nouns (unlike independent and deverbal ones) also show the same choice between a two-word and a one-word coding strategy in non-possessive adnominal modification. In noun-noun compounding, the data merely reveal different preferences of bound and independent nouns for the N1 versus N2 position; here deverbal nouns behave identically to bound nouns in dropping their prefix in N2. In noun incorporation, finally, the relevance of the alienability contrast is similar to that for the two-way noun class system. Inalienable semantics (and morphological boundness) could be argued to determine the incorporability of nouns, but there are also exceptions.

A distinction between inalienable and alienable possession is considered to be crosslinguistically common. For the Tungusic languages, it is generally illustrated with examples that contrast inherently possessed body parts with body parts belonging to a non-inherent possessor, with the latter being formally marked with a suffix - ŋ(V) . However, as we argue here for Negidal (Northern Tungusic), rather than marking ‘alienable’ or ‘indirect’ possession, the suffix - ŋ(i) flags the occurrence of non-canonical possessive constructions; the supposedly straightforward interpretation of the oft-cited examples involving body parts is merely a secondary effect of the particular kind of non-canonical construction involved. This analysis unifies the diverse constructions in which - ŋ(i) occurs, namely with obligatorily possessed body parts, with non-possessible items such as nouns denoting humans or environment terms as well as demonstratives or adjectives, and with other modifiers when the possessee is elided. We complement our investigation with the analysis of the cognate suffix - ŋi , whose main function is to mark the possessor in possessive constructions with an elided head. The function of both suffixes can thus be subsumed under the marking of non-canonical possessive constructions. This analysis can be extended to several Tungusic languages, as the comparison with Negidal’s sister languages shows.

In the adnominal possessive construction of Mandinka (a West Mande language spoken in Gambia, Senegal, and Guinea Bissau), the possessor NP may be simply juxtaposed to the possessee or flagged by the postposition lá . This coding split shows unusual properties in comparison with most of the languages having formally similar coding splits. Crucially, any noun can be modified by an unflagged possessor, depending on the semantic nature of the possessor and of its relation to the possessee. The present-day distribution of the two constructions cannot be analyzed as reflecting an alienability contrast, nor can the alienability contrast account for the emergence of this coding split. The data analyzed in this study suggest that the lá -construction initially referred to situations where the possessor determines the location of the possessee, but is grammaticalized differently depending on the grammatical nature of the head noun and the semantic nature of the modifier. The Mandinka data also show the limits of explanations in terms of discourse frequency, and the need to admit that semantic features such as animacy and control may play a crucial role in the genesis of coding splits in the adnominal possession construction.

A well-known pattern in the encoding of adnominal possession crosslinguistically involves splits in the use of overt and zero marking for alienable and inalienable possession. Overt marking may be restricted to alienable possession, but it is not usually restricted to inalienable possession. Zero marking may be restricted to inalienable possession, but it is not usually restricted to alienable possession. This has been explained in terms of principles pertaining to general properties of alienable and inalienable possession, such as the relative degree of conceptual contiguity between possessor and possessee or the relative need to disambiguate the possessive relation. These principles, however, have generally been formulated based on the synchronic crosslinguistic distribution of overt and zero marking across alienable and inalienable possession, rather than diachronic phenomena that shape this distribution from one language to another over time. This paper discusses several developmental processes that have been shown to recurrently give rise to the possessive markers involved in the alienability splits in question crosslinguistically. These markers develop through metonymization processes whereby various types of pre-existing elements take on a possessive meaning originally associated with their context of occurrence, independently of alienability. The distribution of these markers across alienable and inalienable possession follows from restrictions in the distribution of the source construction, unrelated to possession. Principles pertaining to alienability may possibly play a role in the extension, retention or loss of particular markers across alienable and inalienable possession contexts once they are in place in a language, thus ultimately contributing to the relative crosslinguistic frequency of particular alienability splits. This, however, remains to be investigated. These facts call for a new, source-oriented approach to alienability splits and recurrent crosslinguistic patterns in general. In this approach, individual patterns and their relative crosslinguistic frequency are explained in terms of the properties of multiple source constructions and diachronic phenomena that give rise to the pattern and shape its crosslinguistic distribution over time, rather than particular synchronic properties of the pattern in themselves.