Inalienable Possession - Examples

Examples

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.

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 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 the chief'

the man of the king

ke kanaka o ke ali‘i 'the subject of the chief'

the man of the king

ka lei a Pua 'Pua's lei '

the lei of Pua

ka lei o Pua 'Pua's lei '

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

In English there are even fewer distinctions. One is the double possessive with nouns, which is normally found only with alienable relationships. For example, a friend/picture of Jake's is acceptable, but not normally ?a brother of Jake's. Similarly, the brother/speed of Jake is acceptable, but not ?the friend/paper of Jake.

But because the distinction between alienable and inalienable is rooted in semantics, in languages like English where there are seldom 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.