Inalienable Possession - Variation Between Languages

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."